When it comes to motivation, it can be broken down into two categories:  negative motivation and positive motivation.  Negative motivation is “push” motivation… you are trying to push something you don’t like away from you.  Positive motivation is “pull” motivation… you are trying to bring something that you DO want closer to you.

Each has an area where, generally speaking, it is more effective.  Negative motivation is good for getting you started, for getting that initial movement that is often the hardest part to achieve.  It does not, on the other hand, last all that well.  Positive motivation is just the ticket for that… positive motivation can be a lifelong thing, but in general is not as great for getting the first sparks together to “light your fire”.

Negative Motivation

Negative motivation is very good for getting you moving.  It provides a sharp stimulus that is congruent with out instincts… that thing is unpleasant, get away from it.  Our instincts don’t make a distinction, in this case, between physical unpleasantness and mental unpleasantness… either way, our instinct is just to get away.

This can work very well… if your doctor tells you that you have cancer, and that unless you do what they say you are going to die, that provides some really strong motivation to change your ways and do what they say.  The motivation is sharp, strong, and focused… do what you need to (what the doctor tells you) in order to avoid something unpleasant (dying of cancer).   Since motivation is linked to action by way of a cost/benefit ratio, you can see that the cost (doing what the doctor tells you) is very low in comparison to the benefit (not dying).

Negative motivation has a very definite weakness, however.  It can be quite strong, enough to get you moving when other things wouldn’t, but what happens when you take the negative stimulus away?  The motivation dries up almost instantly.

In other words, once you feel like you are safe from whatever the unpleasantness was, there is no more motivation from that source, though you may keep up whatever changes you have made out of habit.

Positive Motivation

Positive motivation is generally not quite as good at getting you moving.  The natural instinct to avoid unpleasantness is not triggered, thus leaving you without the added boost that brings.  Even if there is something you really, REALLY want, unless the path from here to there is pretty obvious, there may be some doubt, some fear, about your ability to achieve that thing, making it harder to get started.

On the other hand, positive motivation doesn’t necessarily have a defined end, either.  If you lose weight because your doctor tells you that you have to or suffer some really unpleasant problems, then once you lose enough weight, that motivation goes away.  If you lose weight because you want to feel more fit and healthy, however, that motivation doesn’t really go away.  You’re still going to want to feel fit and healthy, even after you’ve achieved your original goals.

Positive motivation gets stronger as you go along.  Seeing progress toward your goal, whatever it may be, reinforces your positive motivation at the same time that it weakens your negative motivation… after all, you’re getting closer to your thing you want (positive, or “pull” motivation) and farther from the thing you want to avoid (negative, or “push” motivation).  Positive motivation can also help you conserve momentum when moving to a new goal after completing your current one.

Summary

The trick of motivating yourself is to know how to combine the two, and which to use when.  Negative motivation is good for getting started, which is why many people who speak about reaching your goals will tell you to share your goals and time frames with someone else.  This induces the negative motivation of not wanting to look bad in front of that person.  That can range from a medium to a very strong negative motivation.  At the same time, however, it makes you start framing the way you look at your goal in terms of that negative light.  This can lead to you looking for ways to avoid both working on the goal and the person with whom you shared that goal.

That’s where positive motivation comes into play.  Once negative motivation gets you moving, you can start to see your progress toward your goal, which helps to strengthen your positivel motivation into a force that can support further progress.  As you make more progress, and the end point (your goal) becomes clearer, positive motivation becomes even stronger, getting to the point where it can really drive you to the next goal once the current one is achieved… as long as you don’t slow down too much.  Once you slow down, you may need the kick from negative motivation once again.

So… that’s a really simple look at the differences between negative motivation and positive motivation.  Do you find that you use one more than the other?  Will you change how you attempt to reach new goals after thinking about the difference?  Let me know in the comments.

Have you ever had one of those times when it seemed like your entire life was in flux, where almost nothing seemed to be stable, something to hold onto while everything else shifts?  It’s relatively common to have had that experience, although not everyone is required to go through it.

So… why do I bring this up?  Well, you might say it has a little personal relevance for me right now.  My employer is currently trying to sell the piece of their business where I work, other people around me seem to be finding greener pastures (in the employment sense), and things have been a bit chaotic on the home front, as we just had a huge yard sale.  This is in addition to writing for this website, and having recently set an ambitious goal of 500 subscribers by November 20th.

My normal rock among all the shifting sands, my wife, has been busy with getting ready for the yard sale (and cleaning up afterwards).  While I helped, and did most of the heavy lifting, she invested far more time than I, and so hasn’t been as available for me as she normally is.

How does this all tie back to self-development?  Quite well, actually… because it has reinforced for me the need to find a center, a place of peace in the middle of your soul.  This is a place that is isolated from the outside world and all of its influences and distractions, a place where you can go when the rest of the world is too much to handle.

How do you go about finding your center?  Well, it’s a combination of things, including learning how to achieve internal quiet, who you really are, and acceptance of your own freedom and the responsibility that comes with it.  So, here’s a short summary of each of these factors:

1. Achieving Internal Quiet

   This is the starting point for finding your center, as it provides a place from which to pursue the other two pieces.  First, a definition – internal quiet is the point at which the surface of your mind is calm, with all interrupting thoughts and distractions dealt with.  Now, a very quick guide on how to achieve it (I’ve mentioned this in a few previous articles):  Find a spot where you can sit and have aa few minutes of time to yourself.  Make yourself comfortable, and close your eyes.  Let any thought that comes up come, drift across your mind, and go back out.  Let any feelings that come up come without attempt at suppression, observe them, and let them go, too.

   Before too long, though the time it takes varies depending on what the circumstances of your life are at the moment, you should reach a place of internal quiet.  Now you’re ready for the next step.

2. Finding Who You Are

   Finding who you are… this is sort of mislabeling.  It may feel like finding who you are, but in reality what you are doing is peeling back the layers you have pasted over the real you, and admitting who you really are inside.  It’s not so much finding as admitting, although you may have buried some things deep enough that you find yourself surprised that they are still there.

   This is the point where you start taking down some of your internal walls and dealing with things that are not pleasant.  This is by far more easily done when you have reached internal quiet, and know how to do so again, as internal quiet allows you to release the pain that some of your digging and demolition of walls allows back up into your conscious awareness.

3. Accepting Your Freedom (And Responsibility)

   When you are well into the process above, you are likely to start recognizing the fact that anything you don’t like about yourself is your own fault, that it’s both caused and continued by your own choices.  If you have a lot of anger inside, it’s because you are holding on to some old injury.  If you have trouble trusting others, it is no doubt because of something else (or the same thing, I suppose) you are holding inside with your walls.  There are two reactions to this realization that you are who you choose to be… you can deny it and turn away, pretending you are someone you are not, and that others are to blame for who you are, or you can embrace it and realize that since these things you don’t like are a result of your choices, that also means you are free to make different choices and change who you are.

   Either way, once you recognize responsibility for who you are, you can never totally bury that knowledge and understanding again.

Once you have done the things listed above, you should be able to tell a significant difference in your level of internal peace and your ability to deal with external stress.  You’ll have a place inside you that can function as your anchor in a life in flux, something to hold you steady against whatever waves may come.

And it’s a spot, that center of your soul, that no one else can ever take away from you.

 

Many people live their entire lives drowning in doubt and fear.  Almost everything they do is motivated by trying to avoid something bad, not pursuing something good.  This leads them to look at everything through a negative lens, which in turn causes them to live lives far below their potential, both potential for success (by whatever their definition) and for happiness.

This is not something that anyone has to accept, though changing can be very difficult.  It is relatively simple, but simple is not the same as easy.  Still, isn’t it worth the effort, when the reward is courage without limit, in whatever circumstances you find yourself?

Where do doubt and fear come from?

Doubt and fear both originate from the same thing… worrying about which choice will turn out with the best (or worst) outcome.  Fear is the worry that comes before the choice, and sometimes between the choice and the outcome.  Doubt is another side of the same coin, the worry that comes after having made the decision… worrying about whether or not it was the best choice.

Doubt and fear are experienced differently, and have different ways of keeping you from reaching your potential.

• Fear

  Fear works by keeping you from making choices that might have the possibility of you getting hurt.  It can cause you to run away, to hide, or to turn a blind eye to opportunity.  It can also cause you to lash out, trying to hide your fear, because you are afraid of someone knowing that you are afraid.

• Doubt

  Doubt, on the other hand, keeps you from putting in the follow through necessary to actually get the results you started out looking for.  It causes you to pull back, to not really give things the energy and attention that they need.  Doubt seldom causes you to lash out at others… it’s far more likely to make you hurt yourself.

How do you find “The End Of Doubt And Fear”?

Since both originate from worry about the outcome of your choices, the way to end them is to remove the uncertainty from your choice.  How do you do that?  By always being true to yourself, always going with the choice that best reflects the real you (not the persona that you project for the sake of others).

Any time that you do something for external reasons, reasons other than it being the choice that best reflects who you are and who you want to be, you bring uncertainty into the picture.  As the uncertainty grows, doubt and fear creep in… which choice is the right choice?  Did you make the best choice?

When you start basing your choices on what reflects who you are and who you want to be, you gain a lot of clarity.  Many choices fall away, being obviously not the right decision for you.  You also lose a lot of your investment in the outcome of your choices, since the choice itself, reflecting you as it does, is enough justification.

As more and more of your choices reflect your nature, there will be less and less uncertainty.  There will only BE one choice, and that choice is the right choice for you, even if it doesn’t end up with the best possible outcome.  This clarity, this lack of uncertainty, makes it harder and harder for doubt or fear to work its way into your life.  You may make a choice that produces an outcome other than what you wanted, but it won’t bother you, because it was still the right choice for you.

And the right choice for you isn’t determined by outside, objective factors.  There is no better or best, worse or worst… it’s the right choice for you, there can only be one right choice in any decision.  Since there is no other choice, there is no way that the outcome could have been better or worse if you had made a different choice.

What happens when doubt and fear are gone?

That one is simple… you find peace.  It doesn’t matter if other people think you made the wrong choice, or if another choice might have, had you chosen it instead, given you better results.  It doesn’t matter because you are making the choices that fit who you are and who you want to be.

And that’s enough.

We all have a natural tendency to start losing our focus as the day drags on, especially when we’re working on something other than what we really want to be doing.  It becomes harder and harder to pay attention to what you’re doing… your mind starts to wander and pretty soon you’re working at a fraction of your peak efficiency.  Sometimes you may even become annoyed at yourself for it, but that doesn’t really help, it just makes it even harder to focus.

There is, however, a fairly simple way to keep your focus all day long, and it doesn’t even take much time.  And, as a bonus, not only will it help you to keep your focus, but it will also help you to train your subconscious in what is important to you, and thus which choices and opportunities to bring to your attention.

And now onto the meat of article, how to keep your focus all day long:

Preparation

The first thing you’ll need to do for this to be the most effective is a list of specific things in your life that you want to improve.  The easiest way to get such a list is to sit down with pen and paper (or electronic equivalent) and write down whatever comes to mind as something you would like to improve.  Anything that is really general, like “I want to be more successful”, refine down to one or more specifics, such as “I want my income to increase”.

Now take that list and narrow it down to something like 4-6 items that are the most important to you.  Take those items you have left and put them into a positive and current sentence.  As an example, if you chose from above the specific of “I want my income to increase”, you could take that and turn it into “My cash flow is increasing.”  That’s positive, as opposed to something like “I’m not going to smoke”, and current, rather than future like “I will make more money”.

So… that’s the one time preparation, although you can, of course, revisit the list at any time if you find that one of the things on it is no longer of as much importance (or if you simply find something of more importance).  There is also daily preparation, done each night just before bed. Each night, just before bed, make a short list of things you need to do the next day.  This shouldn’t be more than few of the most important things, not a comprehensive list of everything you have on your plate.

Now, onto the next phase…

Execution

First thing in the morning, soon after you wake up, take five minutes of quiet time for yourself.  Start this quiet time with deep breathing, concentrating on feeling your breath slide in and out.  After you feel your body relax and your mind achieve quiet (which should only be a couple minutes if you do this regularly) repeat to yourself the phrases from your list… “My cash flow is increasing.”, etc.  Focus on each one for just a moment, then move to the next.  After you have finished that list, quickly review your to do list from the night before and decide the order in which you are going to do those things.  Now you’re ready to go start your day knowing what you need to do and where you want to go… and your focus should be sharp.

You should repeat this process every two or three hours throughout the day.  It should only take a few minutes each time, and the time it takes is likely to go down as you get used to doing it.  It gives your mind a chance to clear out all the debris that working builds up, refocuses you on what you want to improve in your life, and offers a chance to review what is left on your to do list, letting you see your progress and keeping you from straying off too far with distractions.

Each of those three things is important, but the thing that helps the most is clearing out the mental debris.  This builds up constantly during the day and most people only clear it out at night when they go to sleep.  If you keep it cleared throughout the day, however, it’s not there impeding your ability to focus, and also lets you get to the good sleep faster, since there is little built-up debris to clear first.

And that brings us to the final phase…

Review

First thing in the morning is the most important part of the execution phase, because it sets the tone for the day.  There’s another very important part of the whole process, though, and that comes at the end of the day, just before bed.  This is the time when, after doing your deep breathing and review of the areas where you want to improve, you review your to do list to see which things on the list were accomplished.  This can be a good way to feel like you got something productive done that day.

After you review your list for the day, take the time to make a new one for the next day.  You can include anything that wasn’t completed from the day just past, as well as anything new.  Take a moment to picture yourself the next night with your new list accomplished, and then put it away until the next morning.

It’s also a good idea to mentally set a time that you intend to wake up in the morning, and use another phrase, something along the lines of “My sleep is restorative and refreshing.  I awaken each morning focused and alert.”  This combination, setting a specific time and essentially telling yourself that you are going to sleep well, can help you to actually sleep well and awaken in the morning feeling refreshed and mentally clear.

Summary

This process generally takes no more than 30-40 minutes of your day, in 5 minute chunks, and will more than compensate for that time by keeping you focused and operating near to your peak efficiency.  It also helps you to keep an eye on what areas of your life you want to improve, teaching your subconscious to bring situations and opportunities involving those areas to your conscious attention.  If that isn’t enough to talk you into trying it out, remember that it also helps you to focus on getting the most important things done each day, with reminders throughout the day of what you wanted to accomplish.

All of that works out to help you easily keep your focus all day long.  It also helps you to reduce your stress, frustration, and feelings of not getting anywhere, bringing more peace into your life.  It can even help improve your relationships, as that can easily be on both your “areas to improve” list AND your “to do” list.

If you have any suggestions for ways to improve this process, or other things that you can add to it, please leave them in the comments.

 

There was a time, not so long ago, when a great many people would have jumped at the opportunity to switch places with Britney Spears.  That idea is not nearly as popular today, due to the mess that she’s been making of her life.  So where did she go wrong, and how can you avoid the same mistakes?

There is a mistake that is common amongst all demographics, when it comes to leading their lives, but is more prevalent among celebrities, especially if they became celebrities when they were young.  What is that mistake?  The answer is simple… they let other people tell them who they are.

There will always be people around you who want to tell you who you are, either directly or indirectly.  Celebrities have a lot of people in their lives, and those people are even more likely to try to tell the celebrity who they are.  Combine that with becoming a celebrity while you’re young, and thus don’t have a good idea of your own about who you are, and it can be overwhelming.

So, how can you avoid this?  Well, here’s a good start…  The Top 5 Ways To NOT Be Like Britney Spears:

1.  Take Time And Room For Yourself

   It’s important to have some time for yourself, with no one else around.  Your body and your mind both need this time to heal and strengthen.  As a celebrity, and one of the most popular for gossip magazines, Britney has a harder time than most getting time to herself, with the paparazzi always around, as well as fans, people seeking business deals or endorsement, etc.  Non-celebrities can have a hard time finding time for themselves, too, though… friends, family, work, spouse, and especially children can take all the time you have every day if you let them.

   Make sure that you take time for yourself, so that your mind can strengthen and you can evaluate choices that come your way clearly.  This can help you to avoid making bad decisions… like driving 45 MPH with your child on your lap in the driver’s seat.

2. Be Aware Of Others’ Influence

   Other people always have an influence on you.  How much effect that influence has over your actions and choices, however, depends greatly on how aware of it you are.  The influence of others over your choices drops as your awareness of their influence rises.  Perhaps Britney could become more aware of the influence of the people she associates with, and choose NOT to wear a short dress without panties.

3. Take Responsibility For Your Own Choices

   As long as you blame others for your choices, you can’t begin to make the changes that you need in order to avoid repeating the problem in the future.  Taking responsibility for your choices, and your responses to the situations around you, can be difficult.  It means that there’s something less than desirable about you, and it’s YOU that needs to change to fix it.  Britney, if she were to read this, could perhaps take this advice and not blame her mother for associating with the father of her (Britney’s mom) grandchildren.

4. Know Who You Are

   This one is always difficult, when you first approach it.  You have to spend time and attention, focusing on determining what your core priorities are, what your purpose or calling in life may be.  One of my passions happens to be writing, which is why you’re reading this right now.  I suspect that one of Britney’s passions may be music, although that can (rarely) change as life goes on, and she may no longer have music as one of her core priorities.

5. Be Who You Are

   This, of course, is the most difficult of all the advice in this article.  Once you have discovered who you are, and accept responsibility for your own choices, the next step is to give up the personas that you put on for other people and be yourself… all of the time.  Any choice that comes up, you should go with the one that reflects who you are the best.  This may not seem like the best advice, considering what seems to be who some people are, but, as I’ve written before, you are who you choose to be… so make your choice of who you are in some of the time you take for yourself.  Decide who you want to be, and then be that person (and I don’t mean decide to be Lindsay Lohan, I mean choose how you will respond to different circumstances).  You can see that Britney needs help in this area by how wildly her behavior changes.

While it would certainly be pleasant to have Britney’s money, it would not be worth the trade-off with the things going on in her life.  On the other hand, she can always take the steps listed above and change her life, becoming who she chooses to be, instead of letting others define her.  That would bring much needed stability and peace into her life.

So, now you know how to not be like Britney Spears… do you need to stop letting other people tell you who you are, too?

 

Have you ever had that feeling that you are being pushed toward doing something?  You read something about a topic here, hear something about it over there, have something occur in your life related to it at another time… it just keeps popping up.  Well, that’s been happening to me with regards to writing something.

That something is an article about the different levels of awareness.  Each one contains, but is far more than, all the previous levels.  I’m aware of, having experienced them, five different levels of awareness.  It’s possible that there are higher levels that I know nothing about, and if I find out that’s the case, I’ll write an update to this article.

But for now, here are the five levels of awareness:

1. Physical Awareness

   Everyone has this level of awareness.  Even animals achieve this level… it’s basically the awareness of your body, and awareness that it is yours.  You have toes, fingers, a nose, etc., and they belong to you.  This is the level of awareness where most of your instincts live, though some bleed over into the next level.

   At this level you identify with your body, considering your body to be you.  But you are not just your body.

2. Emotional Awareness

   Every person with any level intelligence even approaching being able to take care of themselves reaches this level of awareness, too.  In fact, I’m not certain that a human can survive without the intelligence required.  Emotional awareness is being aware of your emotions, and knowing that they belong to you, as well.  It means knowing that you are angry, or sad, or happy, and that that emotion is yours… ie it’s not the whole world, it’s you.

   At this level, you identify with your emotions.  But you are not just your emotions, either.

3. Intellectual Awareness

   Everyone but the severely retarded (and I’m not being cruel, I mean literally severely retarded people) reaches this state of awareness at least part of the time.  Intellectual awareness is where you move beyond emotions to thoughts.  You think about what is good for your body, what is good for your emotions, and quite likely about the “why’s” of things… why this makes you happy, that makes you angry, etc.  This is the state that most people are in most of the time, although a fairly high percentage of people descends to emotional awareness from time to time, with overwhelming rage, overpowering grief, etc.

   Great things can be accomplished at this level.  Most of science is accomplished here, as well as a fair amount of philosophy.  It is high enough for you to achieve quite a bit of success in most areas of life.  There is, however, usually a yearning for something more, though many people don’t really know what this yearning is, feeling only that something is missing from their lives.

   At this level you identify with your thoughts.  But, you guessed it, you are not your thoughts, either.

4. Spiritual Awareness

   I’m not really sure if “spiritual” is the right word here, and it definitely carries with it certain connotations that might make people react wrongly to it, but I can’t think of a better word.  This is the first level that is not reached by default in an average person.  Spiritual awareness is where you realize that your awareness is beyond your thoughts, that “you” actually observe your thoughts skittering across the surface of your mind.  You become aware that there is something more to you than a body with a brain.

   Your awareness generally starts to expand when you reach the point where you stay at this level most of the time.  It is also, unsurprisingly, the level where most deeper philosophy resides.  It is also the level where you can start filling in that emptiness that a lot of people at the level of intellectual awareness feel by finding your purpose in life, those things that drive you to create.

   Reaching this level does NOT require high levels of intelligence, although most people I’ve met who stay at this level of awareness do possess above average intelligence.  People who achieve and maintain this level of awareness are more likely to succeed, albeit by their definition of success, than those who seldom or never get past the level of intellectual awareness.

   At this level you identify with your awareness.  But there is still one more level left.

5. Connected Awareness

   This is the highest level of awareness I have achieved, and I have not yet managed to get to the point that it is my natural state of awareness.  Connected awareness is where you go beyond “you”, where you realize that the whole idea of “you” that you have built up over your lifetime is false.  It is as different from the previous four levels as intellectual awareness is different from emotional awareness.

   Connected awareness is somewhat hard to describe to someone who hasn’t achieved it yet.  When in that state there is no fear or doubt.  You are still aware of your body, emotions, and thoughts, but you are also aware that they are only on the surface, only a very small part of you.  You can feel that you are connected to everyone around you… you may “know” that intellectually, with six degrees of separation and all that, but actually being able to feel it is something else entirely.  It’s too much to go into in this article, so click here to read my previous article on the subject.

   At this level you identify with… well, to be honest I don’t know how to put it into words.  If any of you have reached this level of awareness and have the words I’m looking for, please post them in the comments.

Five levels of awareness… you progress from one to the next, although how long it takes for each level varies both from person to person and from level to level.  I don’t really know anyone, personally, who manages to maintain the fifth level, connected awareness, as their normal state.  I can guess as to a few famous people who have done so, like Mother Teresa, but again… that’s just a guess.

Okay, so I mentioned earlier that this had come up in several places, so I thought I would link to a few of them, with a tiny bit of commentary:

You are not your thoughts – Henrik over at the Positivity Blog wrote that line in his last post, and it was the final push to go ahead and write this.  I read everything he writes… he’s an excellent blogger/writer.

My previous article – My article on my breakthrough, and how to achieve your own breakthrough, to connected awareness.  I read everything I write, I’m an excellent blogger… just kidding.

I think, therefore I am – Peter at I Will Change Your Life wrote an article recently about Descartes, who is best known for clearly writing about things from the level of intellectual awareness.  I, personally, think it would be better to say “I am aware, therefore I am”… but I’m not quite as well known as Descartes.  Oh, and Peter is a good guy, a good blogger, and from his subscriber growth, clearly on his way up through the world of blogs.

Well, that pretty much wraps that up.  What level of awareness is your natural state?  What’s the highest level you have achieved?  Let me know in the comments.

There is a really simple, foolproof way to not care what others think.  It’s not difficult, it doesn’t take long, and everyone is capable of doing it.  It only takes one sentence to tell you this amazing secret.

I’m going to go about this all wrong and give you the answer right up front, and hope that you stick around afterwards for the explanation.  It’ll be worth it, I promise.

The foolproof way to not care what others think:  Give up telepathy (mind reading for those of you who don’t know).

“Give up mind reading?” you might say.  “What does that mean?”

Here’s what it means:  You can’t possibly know what other people think, unless you can read minds.  So you can’t worry about what people think… you can only worry about what you think they think.

Even if someone were to tell you what they think, they might very well be deceiving you.  After all, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, right?  People are taught from a very early age to misrepresent certain feelings in the name of politeness.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing… if no one were polite, it’s likely there would be a lot more violence in this world.

On the other hand, it makes it even less likely that you will ever know what someone is thinking.  When you worry about what other people think, you’re not REALLY worrying about what they think, you are worrying about what you think they think.  You are worry about the shadow of a shadow… their thoughts as a shadow of their feelings and actions, and your thoughts of what they think as a shadow of the real thing.

Then there’s the fact that you can’t really control what other people think, even if you could actually know it.  In spite of your best efforts, others can, and will, misinterpret your words and actions, and think things other than what you want about you.  Ever said something completely innocent like “Nice weather” and had someone decide that it meant something far more, like you were bored and didn’t want to be with them, etc.?  I have… and it just brings home the fact that people will think what they want, adding or subtracting meaning from whatever you say and do.

So now you can’t control their thoughts, and at best can make a semi-educated guess at what they (the thoughts) are anyway (that smile might be for the person they just left, not for you… or the anger could be at something that happened in their childhood, not what you just did), so you’re spending your time and mental energy on something you can’t know or control.  You’re giving it importance in your life by giving it your attention… attention that you could probably find a better place to spend, something that will actually bring you benefit.

There’s no magical way to not care what you think other people think, but maybe now that you think about it, and realize that you don’t really care what others think, but about what you think they think, and that what they DO think isn’t even necessarily a reflection of what you say or do, then maybe it will help you to realize it’s sily and give it up.

Do you want to have a fantastic relationship?  Do you know how to tell if a relationship has what it takes to be great instead of somewhere between “okay” and “good enough”?

Relationships can seem like tricky things, but the basics really aren’t that complex.  There are certain things that any really good, great, or fantastic relationship will have.  Some lesser relationships will still have some of these things, but often only on one side.  In other words, one person possesses the quality, but not both.  Other lesser relationships will feature both people showing some of the attributes listed below, but missing others.  Sometimes these lesser relationships can turn into great relationships if effort is put into learning, and adopting, the other pieces.

There are many lists of things a relationship needs to be successful, but most of them are of a more mechanical nature.  I’ve even posted a few of that kind myself, listing things like time together, communication, etc.  This list, however, is not things you do, it’s things youhave.

If you want to know whether your relationship has what it takes to be great, and to last the test of time, then evaluate it based on the attributes of a fantastic relationship listed below.

1. You Both Know How To Love

   Do you know how to love?  To really love, not to like, or do things for, or get turned on by, your love?  Do you feel that you are soul mates, that you have a connection so deep that it will be there forever, no matter what happens to the relationship?

   Love takes more than buying someone flowers.  It takes more than holding their hand when you’re out… Love is when you take them by the hand and it reaches out and touches their soul, too.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, or that sounds scary or too deep, then you may not be ready for love.  That’s okay… you don’t have to be in love, and trying to force yourself when you aren’t ready only backfires.

   “Love is patient; love is kind and envies no one.  Love is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude; never selfish, not quick to take offense.  There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope, and endurance.  In a word, there are three things that last forever: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of them all is love.”

   The Bible has some great pieces of wisdom concentrated down to their basics, and this is one of them.  Love is patient and infinite… trials and tribulations can scratch the surface of it, but never damage its depths.

2. You Both Know The Complexities Love Contains

   So you both know how to love, but do you know the complexities that love contains?  Love can encompass and contain your whole awareness at one moment, and be rejected in pain the next.  It never really goes away, not if you truly loved, but you can certainly bury it deeply.  You can bury it so deeply that only you know it’s what is causing you pain, or so deeply that even you don’t know that’s where the pain is coming from.

   Love can have good days and bad days, but it never really goes away, and as soon as you let go of the walls you use to hold it back, it will come surging in again, often bringing with it whatever pain caused you to build those walls, but only temporarily.  The flow of love washes away the pain, though the time required varies.

   Love is complex, bringing both pain and healing, leaving you vulnerable but making you stronger.  If you don’t understand this, if you don’t accept it, your relationship is going to be weaker than it could have been.

3. You Both Have Forgiving Hearts

   There is one thing that is certain in any relationship:  You are going to hurt each other.  If you have a good relationship, it won’t be intentional, but it will still happen.  If you can’t forgive each other when it happens, then your relationship is going to be very shallow.

   If you can’t forgive someone for hurting you unintentionally, you are building walls to keep love away, probably because you are scared of the way it makes you vulnerable.  Those walls will keep the other person out and limit how deeply love can spread its roots.  Shallow roots can still keep it alive, but when trouble comes along, its grip is weak, and it can be ripped away.

   Learn to forgive, and relax those walls… getting rid of them can be scary, and usually hurts right at first, but it will make you a LOT happier in the long run, and the pain is only short-lived.

4. You Love The Other Person, Not The Attention They Are Giving You

   When you are “falling in love”, it’s easy to mistake loving the attention you are getting for loving the other person.  You are getting closer rapidly, you haven’t hit your walls yet, and you’re getting loads of attention.  Attention is the universal currency by which you show that someone is important to you, and it’s an awesome feeling to know that you are important to someone specific, especially if that person is someone you like.  This is also what leads to a lot of affairs, unfortunately… people need to feel important, and if they feel that they aren’t important to their spouse because they aren’t getting attention from them, and someone else comes along and offers that attention and feeling of being important to someone… well, it’s a bad situation.

   There’s a relatively easy test to see if you love the person or the attention, though.  It works like this:  close your eyes.  Now bring up the other person in your mind.  What is it about that person that comes to mind?  If your answer is a part of their body (a la eyes… if it’s certain other portions of their anatomy, don’t kid yourself, you know it isn’t love), or the fun you have together, you may be loving the attention.  If what comes to mind is more of a complete concept, something that’s hard to put into words but is a representation of them and what they mean to you, something that if you’re really open to it nearly brings tears to your eyes… THAT is being in love with the person.

5. You Don’t Have Any Walls Just For The Other Person

   I’ve been thinking a lot about “walls” lately… if you’ve been reading my stuff, you may have noticed.  If you have any walls that are for a specific person, it means that person is important in your life.  You may have walls that only your mother can hit, created in response to some pain she caused at some point in your life.  You may have walls for any specific person who has caused you pain, and that can include your significant other.

   Walls are built to keep pain out, but they don’t… they keep pain in, trapped inside of you.  When you build walls that are just for one person, you are doing two things… you are shutting that person out of that part of you, and you are holding on to pain that they caused.  Holding on to pain that someone specific caused you isn’t really a good way to have that relationship grow stronger and deeper, and a real love is generally either growing deeper or becoming more shallow.

   Holding on to walls at all limits the heights you can reach, but holding on to walls against just one person also limits your depth.

6. When You Close Your Eyes, You Know They’re There

   In any really good (fantastic, anyone?) relationship, you share a bond of a depth that anyone who has not been in such a relationship cannot imagine.  This connection can be stronger or weaker at different times, but one thing should always remain:  if you close your eyes, you should know that the other person is there.  I’m not talking about any psychic phenomenon, like knowing exactly where they are even though you’re hundreds or thousands of miles apart.  I am talking about that unshakable certainty, that depth of connection, that unmovable mountain that says “I am here”.

   If you’ve been in a good relationship where there is real love, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  If you haven’t, I can’t explain it any better than that.  You might be able to guess, but when you feel the real thing you’ll know that your guess wasn’t even a shadow of the truth.

Does your relationship have these elements?  If you’re not in a relationship currently, then may I recommend that next time you find one, and you think it might be THE one, you pause the breakneck plunge for just a moment to come back to this list and see if it has the signs of what could be a fantastic, long-lasting relationship?

As I said, this is not a list of “mechanical” type attributes of a relationship, things that can be quantified.  It’s a list of… well, I don’t know how to describe the common thread, but it’s there.

Does your relationship have these things?  Does it have more or less of any given thing?  Do you think any of the points listed above are more important than the others?  Let me know in the comments.

What is the real you?  What is it that makes up the true you, what belongs to you and only you?  What do you get when you see past the surface, past the anger and fear, “love” and betrayal, hurt, pain, and even agony?  The real you… the deep you, the you that is beyond what the surface you can even imagine.

When you are born, you have no concept of your “self”.  As you grow older, you build up a structure, a belief system, a framework of lenses and mental maps through which you see the world.  You are told, and you believe, that this framework is you.  The framework gets covered with experiences and emotions, and even the spaces between the beams of the support structure get filled up eventually.  You go on about your life with the belief that this giant amalgamation is you.

Everyone else around you believes this, too.  Only what they think of as you isn’t even the structure you have built up… it’s only the surface of that structure, a surface that changes constantly as new experiences, new emotions, and new everything else piles up, sometimes stripping off pieces of the old coverings, but more often simply piling over them, making them part of the inside, and making that structure ever harder to discard.

As you go about, identifying more and more with this framework that you’ve built, some of it intentional construction, most of it not, you build walls, walling off this portion from that portion.  You do this to protect yourself, to keep yourself from getting hurt, but that’s not what they do, it’s only what you fool yourself into believing they do.  Because those walls don’t keep things out, they keep things in.

That’s right… you’re building yourself a prison.  A prison inside a structure that is built of the giant ball of stuff that you call your life.  And you not only build this prison, you voluntarily stick yourself inside of it, trapping yourself in with all the pain and injuries that you have suffered over the years.  And to top it off, the prison that you build, and trap yourself inside, can’t ever even fulfill the purpose for which you supposedly built it… it can’t even keep out new pain!

That’s right… you build up this structure of falsehoods, lies told to yourself, walling yourself in to keep out the pain, and it doesn’t even work.  The walls only function in one direction… they hold things in.  They hold you in… they limit you to far, far below your true abilities.  They keep the pain that you have experienced close to you, so that it can continually injure you and prevent you from healing.  What do you do when the pain builds, when it gets harder and harder to deal with?  You build more walls, and build the walls you have higher!

The walls that you build for yourself are a prison… but they’re also an illusion.  They are part of the framework that you have built up, an integral part as a matter of fact.  But here’s the thing:  that framework isn’t you.

That’s right, all those lenses and perceptions and mental maps, all those experiences and emotions, those hatreds and angers and fears… they aren’t you.  They’re a tiny little pimple that you’ve built up on the surface of the real you.  All that stuff that you’re trying to protect, the part that hurts, the part that knows pain and fear and suffering… that is only the very smallest fraction of you.  It’s like looking at a tiny island in the middle of the ocean, and calling that the ocean.

The real you is vast.  It is deep, and strong, and powerful.  It cannot be hurt by the vagaries of this life, because it is only the tiniest fraction of it that is involved with this life.  Your physical presence, and the structure that you have built up, are merely the tiny portion of it paying attention to what you perceive as your whole life.  And when you identify yourself as that tiny portion, you are giving up the vastness of the real you, like identifying yourself as your pinky.

Your walls you have created are illusions, but they are self-maintained illusions, given the power that you are drawing through your connection to the real you.  Want evidence that what I’m saying is right?  It’s very easy to obtain… all you have to do is let down one, just one, of your walls.  You will immediately feel closer to that vastness that is the real you.  And with each wall that you release, you will find yourself closer to that reality.

When you get close, you may be scared by the openness, the sheer open expanse that you feel  drawing nearer.  After all, for all of your life that you can remember, you have lived inside your walls.  You may never have even had a moment’s clarity, an opening of the mind’s eye to see the vastness around you.  If you HAVE had one of those moments, you may be even more scared, because you have an inkling of what it’s like.

It’s not an empty vastness, though… you aren’t alone.  In fact, when you reach that vastness, you’ll find that you are connected to everyone and everything else, with a deepness of connection that the very word connection doesn’t seem strong enough to convey the reality of what you feel.  You are a part of everything, and everything is a part of you.

It’s sometimes hard to keep this connection to the real you… it’s easy to forget and focus back on the surface structure, identifying with that structure that you’ve built up.  Once you’ve let the feeling go long enough, in fact, it’s hard to remember what it was like… until something triggers it again, and then it all comes rushing back.

There is an old movie called Dune.  They made a newer version of it, too, but I’m talking about the original.  In it, there is a phrase that is repeated a few times:  “The sleeper must awaken.”  I have always identified with this phrase… I’ve always felt like it meant something to me, something more.  I’ve felt like there was something bigger slumbering inside me.

Lately, as I have read, and learned, and written, and looked inside of me, my awareness has gradually expanded, and the phrase has changed, in my mind, to “The sleeper is awakening.”  I felt that bigger thing inside of me stirring from its slumber, starting to uncoil.

Tonight, as I was talking to my wife to help her relax, something clicked.  Sometimes the greatest words of wisdom come when the conscious mind gets the hell out of the way and lets things flow from far deeper inside.  Suddenly, that thing that had slowly been awakening came aware.  The sleeper has awoken.

This connection, this deeper you, is your connection to God, to the awareness that created, and contains, and in a way is, the universe.  But it is being “consciously” (too small a term, I think) aware of that connection, not in some sort of vague “God created the Heavens and the Earth” kind of way.  It is an intimate and strong connection, a direct connection.  It is deep, wordless communication flowing back and forth, much of which, to this point at least, seems to be more of an “I am here” message and an “I know” response flowing from each direction.

This vastness is inside each of us… in fact, it IS each of us.  We are not the limited lives reflected in the world we live in, we are not even the conscious part of our minds… we are far more than that.  But in order to find our true selves, we must first give up the structure that have built up, that we have defined as “us”… and that’s probably the hardest thing in the world to do.  That last wall, the one that separates us from our true selves, the one that is the foundation of support for our whole framework of our lives, is really, really hard to let go.  It is giving up the “you” that you have always known, for a great unknown.

Do not be afraid.  The whole world will change before your eyes, leaving nothing unaltered.  Once you let go of that last wall, and the fear, there will be no doubt, however.

It’s worth it.