I have read a lot of posts about Gratitude, particularly in the context of attracting desires into our lives or as most would say by “The Law of Attraction”.

When I was I my early twenties, I was attacked by a drug crazed idiot who went onto kick the legs away from my then fiancé and punch my mother in the face.

I cannot feel grateful for that BUT I do appreciate what that caused.
It caused very positive changes in the people involved. It could have been the entire opposite.

What then of gratitude? Can one be truly grateful for everything? Or can one be grateful for having the opportunity to experience everything?
Probably the latter.

Is one attracting things or is one attracting the experience of those things?
After all experience is no more than memory and emotions can be felt through memory or imagination – both create memories and both create experience.

"Create your own adventure because experience is all that there is" ⒸAyPee

“The greatest attribute Humans have and the worst is that we have feelings. Some say we are Human Doings not Human Beings.
Actually we are Human Feelings”

~ AyPee

Life exists within Stories

"Life exists within Stories.
That's all we have left from our experiences and we use them to teach and to gain rapport.
It's the glue which holds us together in community and culture.
They aren't true.  They're just agreements "

~AyPee

Turn on, tune in, and drop out

“My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out”

~ Timothy Leary

probably the most famous thing that Timothy Leary said.

Timothy Francis Leary - born October 6th, 1920 died May 31st, 1996

Leary was an American psychologist who advocated the use of psychedelic drugs when they were both available and could be used legally. He conducted experiments at Harvard University in the 60’s together with Richard Alpert and I remember reading about his experiments in The Sunday Times supplement at the time

He believed  that the drugs had potential use in psychiatry and he developed the eight-circuit model of consciousness, which is presented  in his 1977 book Exo-Psychology.

Richard Nixon once described Leary as "the most dangerous man in America"
….. Hmm.. ……. Interesting observation  

Alpert travelled to India in 1967 where he met Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him the name "Ram Dass", meaning "servant of God"
Dass is now a considered contemporary spiritual teacher

 

Sources: Quote:  brainyquote.com Images Google Detail Wikipedia and nytimes.com

Absurd!

but true?

"Those that make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"

~ Voltaire

 

François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his ... Wikipedia

Born: November 21, 1694, Paris, France
Died: May 30, 1778, Paris, France
Education: Lycée Louis-le-Grand (1704–1711)
Buried: Panthéon, Paris, France

Sources http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/voltaire-war/ and Google

Successful Men

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do

~ Bob Dylan

Born Robert Allen Zimmerman May 24, 1941, Duluth, Minnesota, United States
Images care of Google.com

Happy Focus

"Only one thing has to change for us to know happiness in our lives: where we focus our attention."

~ Greg Anderson
Author and founder of the American Wellness Project

 

via @ShareAQuote
shareaquote.com

If, for no other reason

 

*Save the earth..... It's the only planet with chocolate!*

~ Samuel D. Naples

Dilbert’s Daddy

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."

~ Scott Adams,
American cartoonist and writer

• Born June 1957
• Earned a BA in economics and held various roles in big businesses
• Was a big fan of the Peanuts comics and of Mad magazine
• Started drawing his own comics at the age of six but didn’t became a full-time cartoonist until 1995
• Famous for creating the Dilbert comic strip        image and information from Wikipedia
  

Love not working

“If you find something you love to do, you'll never work a day in your life"

~ Erin Reagan 

played by Bridget Moynahan  in Blue Bloods
Series 2 episode 20
‘Working Girls’

Image Getglue.com

Silent interpretation

“God’s first language is Silence. Everything else is a translation”

Thomas Keating

• Born 7th March 1923 in New York City
• Trappist monk (Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance) and priest
• One of architects of the Centering Prayer, a contemporary method of contemplative prayer and of the Centering Prayer movement and of Contemplative Outreach, Ltd
  

 

sources Wikipedia and centeringprayer.com

Planning for disaster

‎"Most people plan by disaster. They think of what can go wrong and then they master it"

~Richard Bandler

Dr RICHARD BANDLER, Co-founder of Neuro Linguistic Programming and creator of Design Human Engineering(tm) and Neuro Hypnotic Repatterning(tm), has always been and remains at the very forefront of new technologies.
For the past thirty years, Richard has dedicated himself to developing new ideas tools, techniques and models for the advancement of human evolution. His genius as a trainer is world renowned.
Thousands of people provide testimony to his ability to help them to live their lives with greater happiness and freedom. He teaches with humour and joy and continues to care enough to share his newest discoveries with us.

Fly Right

"Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude"

~ Zig Ziglar

Hilary Hinton "Zig" Ziglar
U.S. Motivational speaker and author. 
Born November 6, 1926

Image: Zig  Ziglar in March 2009 is  from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zig_Ziglar

DO Management

“ I don’t have a To Do list”

~ Peter Thomson

 

 

“ The only important thing to do is the next thing”

~ Michael Neill

 

“Manage by outcomes not presence”

~ the guy who did the presentation for Microsoft at ‘Business 2012’ at the O2 on Tuesday 20th March 2012

 

Timely reminders that we tend to forget

In the “Product Creation Goldmine” 3 day workshop that I attended, Peter Thomson explained how he manages his priorities. “I don’t have a To Do list. I have a Do list”, he said.

We can create endless lists of things to do. Don’t get me wrong, we have to make lists because it focuses us on the next thing we need to do and it can also give a feeling of satisfaction when the list is complete. Happy Happy   ….

A few years back I heard Michael Neill say something remarkably similar. He was saying forget the list, do the most important thing that you need to do next and then do the next most important thing that you need to do after that. Happier Happier …  

At the Business 2012 exhibition the Guy (I don’t know his name. I ambled in half way through his presentation) on the Microsoft stand, whilst presenting Microsoft’s Anywhere, said “Manage by Outcomes not Presence” Even Happier …  

I was timely reminded!

So why do we forget and get ourselves bogged down with big lists and then feel the pressure and probably demonstrate stress?
Because we forget. I don’t know why. I do it myself!

I think the key is set up something to remind you and feel really good about how free we are doing what we need to do.
Re(place your)mind yourself and bump up the good feeling.

I use Simpleology’s programme to help me focus, in particular, what they call the “Dream catcher”. I dump my thoughts into the Dream Catcher and forget about them until I “Start my day”, as they put it, which is another part of their programme. 

To be honest, I haven’t looked at any other time and thought management programmes. I got this from my friend  (“the famous”) Jo Dodds (I expect she might be embarrassed by that  - which is why I said it!) …    

So getting things done is getting rid of the things we need to do next whilst do what we need to do now and then feeling really great about how unpressured we really are and feeling good for no reason whatsoever.
We have the list. The list doesn’t have us!

As a former Business Continuity Manager, the main thing I learnt was gauge the impact and the urgency - What is the impact of not doing something?
- How urgent is the thing that has to be done? And then the overriding question:

Does it have to be done at all?

The combination of how urgent and what is the impact of not doing it works for me!
I check it off against my grid and re-sort my Simpleology accordingly and that allows me to Focus on what I believe is the most important thing:

How good can I feel for absolutely no reason

 

images thebestyoucanbe.org  imindshift.com  microsoft.com AyPeeCo
Jo Dodds can be found at jododdssocialmedia.com

A Thought from a "Cluttered" Mind!

Made me smile! From Candy S's blog: 'Finding Order in Chaos'

A Thought from a "Cluttered" Mind!.

But what if this were true? Maybe it is :-)

Memory

Perhaps there is some truth in the following quotation!

One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory

Rita Mae Brown

Born November 28, 1944.
American author and screenwriter, best known for her 1973 novel Rubyfruit Jungle, famous for its explicit lesbianism

source Wikipedia

 

Prisoner of your mind

"Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds"

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945

Elected 32nd president of the United States of America in November 1932 during the depths of the depression, he carried out that office for 12 years. The only American president elected to more than two terms

Source whitehouse.gov, wikipedia.org and criminal minds fan site

Slaughtering the Profound

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”

~ Henry Miller

American Author from New York, amongst his works were ‘Tropic of Cancer’ and ‘Tropic of Capricorn’ .

Born in 1891 (died 1980). He was recognised, amongst other things, as a critic of American values, in his day and was passionate about telling his truth. He lived in America and Paris, where he wrote semi autobiographical fiction.

Read more at wikipedia.org, henrymiller.info and biography.com

Quote and image appears in various web sites

Who lies

 

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

~unknown

image from freemages.co.uk 
Quote from shareaquote.com 

Go Create

Life isn't about finding yourself.
Life is about creating yourself”
~ George Bernard Shaw

Born 26 July 1856 died 2 November 1950
Irish playwright and co-founder of the London School of Economics

source various
image wikipedia