reading

Joe Vitale Answers That . . .

Well, I’m done looking for ways to apply The Secret, or acquire affluence in general.

Ok, I haven’t exactly made a secret of the fact that I was uncertain about what I am passionate about – that thing the Success Guru’s call “My Calling” or “My Mission.”

After getting Natalie Ledwell’s book last week, one of the bonuses she shared was a series of interviews (usually around 15 minutes long) with acknowledged masters of the Law Of Attraction (LOA).  I’ve shared in earlier posts my reaction to interviews with Bob Proctor, and Marci Shimoff.  The most recent one I watched was Joe Vitale.

In this one, Natalie pointedly asked Joe what advice he’d give to anyone who didn’t know what their passion was – which immediately made me sit up a bit straighter.  Here was a question I REALLY wanted the answer to!  He said (and this might not be exact, but it is as close as my memory will make it) “Look at what you’re afraid to do.  Your life’s purpose will be hiding right behind that which you’re most afraid of doing.”

Geee – thanks Joe.  It only took me about a nano-micro-second to know EXACTLY what he was pointing at in my life.  I’ve had dozens of different people, from all over the social and political spectrum, tell me that I should do it, and it actually was something I entertained the idea of pursuing when I was a kid.

Surely there has to be another way!  That’s one bridge that burned beyond repair many years ago.  I lit the fire, too.

In this lifetime, I am NOT going to be the President of the United States of America.  That’s one reason why I made the joke on one of my earlier blogs about not running for president myself, but if someone who knew how to organize and finance a campaign wanted to start one and draft me, I’d do it.  It was a safe statement, because I knew in advance that it would never happen.

I am not going to live in a fish bowl and have my every behavior scrutinized and criticized by people who can’t actually DO anything, but make a living off of making others worry.  I’m not going to try to obtain a job that can’t do anything of lasting value without the cooperation of 541 elected foot-draggers and progress blockers who only care about their own profit, or their own path to power.

Besides which – someone out there kills idealists who manage to get elected and try to buck the system, or change it.

Are you sleeping enough?

One of the services that I use to monitor the “world” of the internet is Stumble – I click on the Stumble icon in my browser, and it randomly jumps to a new website based on general categories I’ve indicated an interest in. I also periodically get a newsletter where they highlight some sites I might like based on reviews I have written on their previous recommendations.

One recent newsletter caught my attention with an article about SLEEP. Probably because the last couple of years I’ve had a real problem with getting enough. I am certain that I haven’t slept 7 consecutive hours in over 3 years, and there are whole months that go by (especially in spring) when migraines and arthritis pain tag-team to force 2 or 3 tries at sleeping to reach an accumulated total of 6-7 hours.

Anyway, this article was worth a careful reading to me, and I thought some of you might like it as well.

http://time.com/4672988/the-sleep-cure-fountain-of-youth/

Thinking about dreaming…

I know – I have way too much time on my hands if I have time to waste thinking about what goes on in our heads while we sleep.  Still, I am in a rather unique position to do so, and motivated by one particular dream that I have so often it has become a welcome friend.  I’ve blogged about this friend before – the “Superman” dream where I fly, have perfect health, and no disability.  Between that and my reading of spiritual self-help guides like Joseph Campbell, I think I’m getting some insight.

First, let me be the first to tell you that there is no “mystical” component to dreams.  The fact of dreaming something does not mean that the event is likely to happen.  It is my considered opinion – at this time, at least – that dreams are ONLY useful for getting to know ourselves better.  What makes us tick, so to speak.

With that in mind, let me tell you what a dream really is.  There are three types of dreams: wishes, fears, and solutions.  Solutions are VERY rare.  Most dreams are our subconscious mind trying to express our deepest fears or wishes in ways that we can relate to.  Take my “Superman” dream – in the first 16 years of my life, I was a fairly normal kid.  I played outside, got sprained ankles and bruises.  I gathered some unhealthy and unwanted negative attention because I did not fit in with my peers – my spiritual leanings were much stronger and more focused than theirs.  I’d venture to guess they still are.  However, just before I turned 18, I had my first real, personal, brush with mortality, in the form of the bone tumor in my left leg.  I was on active duty in the US Army, and progressing through a development regimen that was contracted to culminate in Special Forces training.  On the day of the surgery, I went from being as close to an ideal man as I could hope to be, to being someone who would never again be physically exceptional in any way.  I’ve struggled long and hard with that, and still do.  This is expressed by the frequent dream of being Superman – it is my innermost greatest dream to reclaim what was lost in the surgery suite that day.

Let me share something from Joseph Campbell’s book “The Power of Myth”.  This book is a running transcript of an interview between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, and I wholeheartedly recommend reading it – again if you’ve read it before.  I’m on my 4th reading.

Moyers:  A man once told me that he didn’t remember dreaming until he retired.  Suddenly, having no place to focus his energy, he began to dream, and dream, and dream.  Do you think that we tend to overlook the significance of dreaming in our modern society?

Campbell:  Ever since Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published, there has been a recognition of the importance of dreams. But even before that there were dream interpretations.  People had superstitious notions about dreams – for example, “Something is going to happen because I dreamed it is going to happen.”

Moyers:  Why is myth different from a dream?

Campbell: Oh, because a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream.  The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.  If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group.  If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

Moyers:  So if my private dreams are in accord with the public mythology, I’m more likely to live healthily in that society.  But if my private dreams are out of step with the public –

Campbell:  — you’ll be in trouble.  If you’re forced to live in that system, you’ll be a neurotic.

Moyers:  But aren’t many visionaries and even leaders close to the edge of neuroticism?

Campbell:  Yes, they are.

Moyers:  How do you explain that?

Campbell:  They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience.  Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve to work out your life for yourself.  Either you can take it or you can’t.  You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations.  The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience —- that is the hero’s deed.

I’m not trying to say that I’m some sort of hero, just because I’m out of step with mainstream society.  Nor am I saying that I should be a leader.  But, mainstream society is not built out of leaders and heroes – it is built out of sheep.  Followers.  People who prefer conformity to adventure because it is safe.

Incidentally, that is why Hollywood makes hundreds of millions of dollars for mass producing epic adventure stories on film.  It gives the sheep the experience of adventure without the risk or the societal estrangement.  For sheep, it is the perfect escape.

Fine Tuning . . .

First off – let me state with no reservations that the paleo diet has helped me fantastically.  It managed to accomplish what no other diet I’ve tried over the last 20 years did – I lost weight and kept it off.

I recently had to go to a chiropractor, because I got a little too ambitious with a deceptively effective easy exercise – the Hindu Squat (to see an example of how to do one http://www.cbass.com/Furey.htm  ) and over the next day my lower back and hip muscles practically locked up. When I was at the chiropractor (who I’ve been seeing off-and-on since 2006) his jaw dropped and he congratulated me on how much different I looked.  He totally understood that the paleo diet has been helping, and he said my other exercises were putting the muscle in the right places.

So, I’m pretty much on track to taking back my life – with one exception.  The migraines and arthritis still get in the way of much that we’d call normal living.  However, my wife and I have already established that a healthy diet can do fantastic things for our bodies – she confronted and BEAT endometriosis using nutrition and chiropractic – so we decided to see if it would work for migraines and arthritis, too.

Turns out – going paleo for weight loss was a huge step in the right direction for that, as well.  My wife recently found Dr. Peter Osborne’s new book “No Grain, No Pain” (ISBN: 978-1-5011-2168-5 or ebook ISBN: 978-1-5011-2170-8) – and one of the big bombshells we got right away is that migraines AND arthritis can be caused by the EXACT same thing – a gut made unhealthy by the use of NSAID pain killers.  Which I used very heavily in the first 15 years after the surgery on my bone tumor – back when I didn’t know any better.

The good news is that the book also said that the unhealthy gut is reverseable, with the right diet controls.  First on the list was getting rid of all grains – which is a lot harder than it sounds.  Grains are EVERYWHERE these days – thickening agents in canned soups is just one example where you wouldn’t think to look. Another is instant coffee – all of them. If your meats are raised on grains, you’re still getting grain in your diet even if you try to avoid it.  HFCS is also a trigger – and has the additional warning that it is one of the vehicles by which you’re putting poisonous MERCURY into your system.

Oh, I got a bit off track.  Anyhow, the book has 3 sections – part one covers the science behind the program, part 2 tells you what you’ll be doing, and part 3 has a diet and menu plan to put you on the track to hopefully the best health you’ve ever had.  We aren’t quite at the level of starting the 15 day challenge yet, but we’re taking steps in that direction.  Finding a reliable source of grain-free meats is tough – at least around here.