"Fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward."
~Amelia Earhart
Our fears are horrible when we indulge them in the mind. Inside the mind a fear looks real. It looks threatening. It sends a cold liquid chill through my whole system, making even my lungs feel cold.
But put it on paper! Put it on a white board! Put it out on the table for my coach to look at and discuss, and all of a sudden it is reduced to a thought. A simple thought. And then the more you look at it the more you see that it's not even a true thought.
The best process I've ever seen for this is Byron Katie's process called "The Work." But negative thoughts, worries and fears can also be deleted by using Martin Seligman's disputation method, a version of the same thing. Seligman wrote the great book, Learned Optimism. His studies covered 20 years and over half a million people. He proved scientifically that optimism can be learned. That happiness is a thing to master, like the piano. It's not a personality trait. It's not a character flaw to be fearful and worried all the time. It's a failure to practice.
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If you have a religion, if you have a practice, increase it. Don't wonder why it's not taking you anywhere. Don't wonder why it's not doing anything for you. Increase it. Step it up. Really get into it. Because the more you do, the more spirit comes into your life.
People often ask me about the best mind shifts I've ever seen. And I talk about more than 30 ways to execute a mind shift in the new MindShift CD series (www.stevechandler.com) ... but the best way is to have a practice that introduces more and more spirit into your life.
If you don't find such a practice, borrow one. Go along with somebody. Have someone teach you. Do something, but have spirit be a part of your success plan. Don't leave it out. Don't have it be only a flat land, linear life that you are going to follow. Some anxious horizontal rat race where you think it's enough to go from having no money to being a millionaire because it's an empty game.
When you get to the end. It's empty. It's a betrayal. You end up like Donald Trump with a bad haircut, a nasty disposition and an empty-headed trophy wife. It's like, "OK, I've got my million, now what?"
Have your heart grow, along with your mind and your body. Have your soul grow too. Whatever you come to find that to mean. Go into spiritual literature, go deep and allow yourself to have an experience. The beautiful part about the reality of spirit is that it connects on the experiential level. It is an experience. It becomes an actual experience.
It becomes more real than what you think is real. And if you choke off your connection to spirit, if you deny it and turn your back on it, you are actually flattening yourself out to the most meaningless shallow, linear life imaginable. And that's why there are so many people who have to make other things into their religion. There's a longing in the soul for spirit. For a manifestation. Spiritual growth. Conscious contact with a higher power. There's a longing for it.
When that longing gets shut off, by whatever means they use to shut it off, to deny it, to say it's ridiculous, to say it's an ancient myth---I'm not falling for it. Anything I use to shut off the very reality of that experience is going to lead me to make something else the religion, and you've met people like that. People who now have money as their religion. Or power. Or growing their business. Or building their second home. I know people, who other people would call successful, but who are just absolutely obsessed with finding new and better ways to make more and more money. Not stopping to smell the roses, not stopping to hug their loved ones. Just boom----BOOM! ... off to another country---there's an opportunity there---and it's just a mania--well, it's a religion
So why not have the religion, whatever it is in your life, be real. So that what it brings is enlightenment, spirit, grace, salvation----all the things that are just so beautiful and that don't exist on the linear plane so can't be proven in a linear way. They are bigger than that. They are more real than that. It's not that they're unreal---they're more real.
Some people warned me not to talk of these things in my MindShift program. They said to keep it secular and flat and safe. But then how would the mind truly shift? And without spirit, how would it keep shifting? My experience says that it wouldn't. And I don't much care if the audios I make from now on don't fit the current culture. My purpose is to have some fun. And by fun, I mean real fun that lasts.
Oh, and in case you missed it last time, here's a free eBook for you that gets into this subject in an even more exciting way: http://www.stevechandler.com/Free.html
I think a little bit dieefrfnt.1. He won't use a Leica or any camera that requires any form of skill, because he needs a maximum of simplicity like in a point-and-shoot camera or an iPhone.2. He could be a fashion photographer, yeah well, but in my opinion, Mac Computers changed their appearance only slightly in the last years, same goes for all that other iStuff. But as he seems to like things made of glass and metal, he'd probably be into architecture3. He'd probably work with only one model. Or no model at all and claim it's a feature of his style of photography.4. He'd use some of these typical apple themes from iWork or iPhoto as a background I guess 5. He would maybe have 1 (!!!) style that is dieefrfnt from the rest. He'd try to keep things simple (even here). I do like apple products and their computers very much, but all of their products look the same 6. Aperture (and Lightroom) is already there, so there's no need to produce any more product lines of this type of softwareIn the end his pictures will look like total crap, but apple fanboys will buy them for a shitload of money because he'll sell his lack of experience and the resulting special shooting style as a feature (like on iPhone and iPad and Flash )
Posted by: Freezing | October 26, 2012 at 11:25 AM
Sanjin....thanks for the comment. I do enjoy mixing the secular world up.
Posted by: steve chandler | May 29, 2008 at 11:11 AM
Steve:
It's so true, nothing outside of ourselves can truly make us happy... that only happens by looking inside and knowing yourself and connecting to spirit (who we really are). Thanks for having the courage to tell it like it is.
Posted by: Julie Blake | May 28, 2008 at 11:02 AM
Dear Steve,
thank you for this post - it's great that you decided not to listen to the "secular" advice... ;-)
Actually, I would say that spirituality is what your whole opus is about, and there's no doubt that an intelligent reader could get mixed up! :-)
Posted by: Sanjin Vukojevic | May 28, 2008 at 03:36 AM