Personal Meditation no. 194

“Your beliefs are your actions. What you say is just what you think.”

Embrace the Within.

I had no idea how much work the email deletion and unsubscription process was going to take during my day, however, it is going a long rather well. You get a lot of emails over a few decades of traveling around this planet especially when you are prone to investigating and wondering and buying and building and growing. There is a lot out there that folks want to sell me. Whether it be a product or a service, selling is never in short supply. Supply is always a victim of scarcity but selling is never scarce.

And that goes with ideas mainly in the realm of social media as well. Living here for any amount of time seems to qualify folks to speak truth about every topic on God’s earth and above it. I know that I used to believe I had it all figured out just as much as anyone else blindly stumbling around on this temporal globe. There is never a shortage of experts that have it all figured out. Never a shortage of blind folks ready to lead the blind into darkness. When my life was a mess, I somehow thought my mess was better than the messes of other folks too.

Now that I am less of a mess, because life is messy and complicated, I know that I am in no place to elevate myself. I didn’t elevate myself alone. It always takes a community of folks that struggle and support and encourage and elevate each other. None of my knowledge is unique or individual. I gained that knowledge through the same process as always, judging what others have said and done and evaluating their success. And if success is being negative about your life, if success is being angry about the government, if success is being scared of the next disease, if success is being led to react to the next narrative, if success is being enslaved to corrupt systems, if success is promoting murder and violence, if success is piling up fiat at the expense of your very soul, if success is mandating that others think as you, if success is mandating others act like you, if success is advocating for any temporal solutions, then I no longer want that definition of success.

Success for me is waking up each day. Success for me is making sure this body runs smoothly from top to bottom by giving it all the exercise and fuel and hydration it needs. Success for me is steadily working my way through the Bible, I just finished Leviticus this morning, and getting the big picture of the whole of that book and not just the snippets of scripture that typically just get tossed around in life. Success for me is simplifying things as much as possible. Success for me is taking control of my life. I don’t call anyone to do what I am doing because I know the struggle I had to get through to get here. I am not forcing anyone to think anything they do not want to believe. I am not forcing anyone to do what they do not want to do. Life is voluntary. Faith is voluntary. The Bible is full of folks standing up when God calls and saying, “Here I am”. And when God calls and reveals the working of God to you, you get the choice to ignore those works or acknowledge them. You get to choose. And the idea of choice is what the Bible is all about. There is nothing conscripted of us, rather we are given the opportunity to follow the commandments. We are given the opportunity to make ourselves right. We are given the opportunity to make amends, to agree, to atone. Your body, your choice.

Have the day you want. I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.

#ThinkBetter #BeBetter #NoGodsNoMasters #MyBodyMyChoice #MakeYourselfGreatAgain #EmbracetheWithin

Personal Meditation no. 193

“It’s not all in your mind but if you don’t control your mind, then the rest doesn’t matter.”

Embrace the Within.

Do you get a lot of emails? I get a lot of emails and I spend a lot of my time just deleting emails that I don’t want. I get bombarded with all these emails that I don’t remember signing up to get and I don’t ever read much more than the heading when they appear in my inbox. For years I have just sat passively and deleted them. That is until today. Today, I started to scroll down to the bottom of those emails and click the unsubscribe button. Rather than mindlessly letting these emails appear daily and deleting them daily, I chose to purposefully get rid of the clutter because I like my messages to be meaningful.

There is a lot of spam out there hitting my inbox. And now I find a need to scroll down to the bottom and hit unsubscribe. I am not going to choose to get emails from all over the place and merely delete those messages, I am going to get to the source and cut that off. For years I have needlessly wasted time just deleting emails when I could have simply scrolled to the bottom once and clicked unsubscribe. How much time have I wasted with those emails filling up my inbox? How much energy was wasted daily deleting these meaningless messages? How many meaningful messages got lost in the mix with the mindless scrolling and deleting? I will never know BUT I can assure you there are lots.

The world is full of solicited and unsolicited messages filling up our inboxes and spam folders. So many messages on billboards, radio, television, YouTube, Spotify, Hulu, Facebook, Twitter, and all places near and far. There are so many messages that are not meaningful. So many messages that I try to delete. So many messages that can get overwhelming. So many messages that bombard your mind. So many messages that influence you in all the effective ways and hack your mind and ruin your soul.

For years I have been studying and teaching influence and even I fall for the techniques because the techniques are well-crafted, tested, and easily replicated. The techniques work and are repeated and even those that study the process get worked. It’s overwhelming. All the information, all the messages, all the advertisements, all the bullshit, is so overwhelming that it makes life more difficult to understand. The background noise overwhelms the meaningful and the overwhelming abundance of garbage information and garbage products and garbage ideas just gets to be too much for me to decipher and make meaningful. So, my brain goes back to what it’s programmed to do. It takes shortcuts and goes back to the paths of comfort and routine.

And that is where I needed to change. You see, I can cut down on the spam in my inbox. I can cut down on the messages I receive. I can avoid so much technology and influence BUT I can’t eliminate that supply. I can shut down as many sources as I like and just as a hydra another set of heads will appear in its place. So, the change needs to come from both external and most importantly internally. I needed to change my brain to another routine. I needed to change my thoughts to not fall into having another cigarette. I needed to change my thoughts to not eating another fast food option. I needed to change my thoughts to not hitting the snooze button. I needed to change my thoughts. Changing the routine and the paths of my brain took time. IT wasn’t an easy process. BUT it was something I could change. I used to waste so much time working on changing the ways of the world when I should have kept my focus on changing me. And that is what I am working on today. I am going to keep unsubscribing from the meaningless in the world and changing myself into something meaningful.

Have the day you want. I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.

#ThinkBetter #BeBetter #NoGodsNoMasters #MyBodyMyChoice #MakeYourselfGreatAgain #EmbracetheWithin