Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now exploded into the global consciousness in large part due to the fact that most people were not living in the present moment, and were finding the results untenable.  The actuality for many people is a life being lived for them where their actions are really more on the line of reactions.  And that is no way to live…

Most of us have heard the Socrates quotation “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Well we have learned the hard way that neither is the Over-Examined life too hot either.  Living a balanced life however, is the best way of all.  Going about seeking balance has it’s own challenges that can only be overcome with Clarity of Mind.  In my experience, the best way to attain this is be associating with individuals and groups of people that have this in spades.  It isn’t even necessary for them to be people in the same fields of study and/or endeavor.  Neither do they need to be in agreement when their fields overlap, or even to agree with your own beliefs and perspectives.

If you take a look at the bottom of the sidebar of this page you will find the RSS feed to the TED YouTube channel.  TED is a group of 1,000 people that are invited each year to a summit where they speak on their own arenas of interest.  The best minds of the world from Tony Robbins to Stephen Hawking and from Rick Warren to Dan Dennett each speaker is an able speaker with an amazing mind.

If you want to stretch your mind and achieve clarity, you can do no better than to listen to these speakers.  Each segment is about 20 minutes long, and whether you agree or strongly oppose what is being said, I guarantee you will be benefited by the time you spend listening to these well thought out presentations.

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I just read “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz and immediately read it a second time.  It’s just that good.  And frankly that short.  Having immersed myself in Tolle, Troward and a host of “New Thought” authors recently this was refreshingly accessible in a much more immediate sense.

The book is said to be taken from ancient Toltec teachings, and does indeed have some interesting archival information on Toltec legend and how it leads into the main body of the work, which is made up of the Four Agreements themselves.

This part of the book is simple, straightforward and accessible without being tedious.  This may be why it is such a small volume, but don’t be fooled it is packed with useful and usable insights and teachings.  The Four Agreements are:

1.  Be Impeccable With Your Word. This may not sound like ground breaking stuff, until you consider what is meant by this.  Ruiz stresses the vital import of being impeccable with your word to yourself. It is made quite clear however that this is not just self serving but beneficial to society as a whole.  Seeking to do no harm by your words or actions so that your own path is not hindered is a vital aspect of the first agreement.

2.  Do Not Take Anything Personally. A very difficult agreement for many to keep if you consider the animosity between people as a matter of course, but quite simple in application.  Once you understand that people are reacting to their own internal dialog (or dream as Ruiz teaches us) it becomes much easier to separate the words and actions of others from ourselves.  This agreement brought to mind the NLP thought: Everyone is doing the best they can with the resources available to them.

3.  Do Not Make Assumptions. Closely related in some ways to the second agreement, this deals with our tendency to not take into account that there is almost always more to any situation than we are aware of.  Acknowledging that we are not omniscient removes so much emotional detritus from our lives that this agreement alone will relieve a huge amount of stress from our lives.

4.  Always Do Your Best. The part of this that makes it such a vital agreement is understanding that your best will be a dynamic thing.  Your best will be better at some times than it will at others, and you must accept this!  If you always to the best you can in that moment then you can be at peace with the results, knowing that your effort held all you could do with the knowledge and resources at your disposal.  Notice the synergy with the previous two agreements?

An important aspect here is that these four agreements are ones that you are making with yourself.  As such they require the cooperation of no other individuals, and are therefore adoptable by any one that chooses to do so.  They are meant to replace agreements you have already made with yourself: agreements that are destructive to yourself on almost every level.

Integrate these four positive and constructive agreements with a life lived in the ever unfolding present moment and it will add joy to your life, and even more importantly remove pain and stress from your life nearly effortlessly.

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom,

A Toltec Wisdom Book

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In spite of the title of my site (LOANow), I have held off writing directly about the Law of Attraction because of the prevalence of information on the subject that makes the LOA sound like a Cosmic ATM!

Visit any forum on this subject and you are bound to find threads by people looking for help manifesting  new cars, luxury homes and stacks of cash.  And this by people who have no interest in the more basic forms of manifesting that deal with day to day issues of peace and harmony within their lives.

This is not possible!

You must address these issues as a basis for progressing in manifestation.  Attempting to jump ahead, so to speak would put you in a position where you were in conflict with the LOA, not working with it.

The Law of Attraction is a natural law, like gravity.  And you ignore it’s basic tenets with the same degree of danger you would have if you ignored gravity.  This means that if you want to harness this power, it is necessary to experience it as it occurs in everyday life as an observer before you even attempt to steer it with your own thoughts and energy.  Even with the Law of Attraction you need to be able to crawl before you try to run a marathon…

We have each already observed the Law of Attraction at work whether we realized it or not.  How often have we seen someone put out negative energy in the form of anger only to get anger back?  How often have we seen that some people never seem to have a problem with anyone due to their own calm demeanor?  In each of these cases, the party  with the greatest strength behind the type of energy they are emanating will prevail.  With one seeming exception, which we will get to later.

So each and every one of us are manifesting through the energy we emanate through our thoughts, words and actions.  You are already interacting with the Law of Attraction by thinking, speaking and going about your business every day just as you are interacting with gravity by failing to fall off the planet!

What we want to do though, is to learn to interact with the Law of Attraction in a beneficial way.  And when we say beneficial, we mean beneficial to all.  As if we seek to manifest in a way that is harmful to others in order to benefit ourselves, our efforts with fail.  They will fail because by definition they are in conflict with the Law of Attraction.  To attempt to manifest something that is good for the manifestor at another’s expense is a selfish act and will attract selfishness from others, hindering the desired results across all aspects of the manifestors life.  See how this works?

So the first thing we need to develop in order to begin even the most basic forms of Law of Attraction manifestation is to develop Awareness.  What is meant here by Awareness is first of all to be Aware of one’s own identity as opposed to the over-identification with one’s own positions, and identification with the content of life that is so common today.  Awareness also includes being cognizant of everyone else as something other than competitors.  The best way to accomplish both of these is to meditate on the following affirmation:

Everyone is doing the best they can with the resources available to them.

This helps to build our empathy with the condition of others and eliminate our feelings that we need to overcome them as such.  Awareness is key to success in your efforts to use Law of Attraction manifestation techniques.  This is one of the reasons that I have given more attention to writing about The Power of Now issues as they help to overcome the out of balance ego that the majority of the world struggles with.

Developing this kind of Awareness will result in an existance marked with peace, harmony and a comforting realization of where one fits in the Universe.  It also will give you a much better feeling about all of the other individuals we come in contact with on a daily basis.  Yes, even the ones we don’t really like all that much, lol…

Awareness is also the energy that tips the scales in favor of the Aware.  Remember the one exception to the rule that the one manifesting with the most energy will prevail?  Awareness trumps all.  You can come up against the angriest of individuals with their yelling and cursing, and overcome them with far less energy as long as you are acting out of Awareness.  This is because the energy that Awareness brings is of such a higher order, that it trumps just about everything it comes up against.

I will be writing further about the Law of Attraction and Manifestation techniques.  It will be with an understanding that to even begin working to use LOA techniques as a steering mechanism, you have to start by developing Awareness as a baseline within your life.

Jim

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I was talking with a long term client the other day, and was discussing his desire to lose twenty pounds.  When I asked what his weight currently was his response floored me!

“Oh, I won’t get on a scale so I really don’t know!”

This raised a whole new arena of questions due to the conflicts inherent to the specific situation.  Having a specific goal to lose twenty pounds while refusing to acknowledge ones current weight is self defeating from the word go, but that is not even the part that was most important to address.

A large part of what I try to help people to achieve is centered around Awareness.  Awareness of and presence in The Now.  Living a life of presence in this moment, not looking forward or backward.  Eschewing all of the folderol that accrues when we live our lives to be happy/content/relaxed “As Soon As…”

To do this in any full sense means also being aware of what the current moment is.  And being aware of it means also accepting what is.  To it’s fullest extent this includes being at peace with what is.  That may seem a bit much to expect to many people with serious challenges in their life, but it is achievable for all…

My client wanted to change his situation without really knowing what his situation was.  Anybody see a problem here?  If you cannot accept your situation (what is) then you have no real hope of changing it.   In actuality, willful ignorance of a situation he didn’t like was keeping him from not just changing the situation but also from real peace and joy right now!

How so?  Well let’s consider what happened next!

I trotted out my faithful bathroom scale and literally forced him onto it.  The result?  He weighed more than he hoped but less than he feared.  He was also only 18 pounds from his goal wieght.  Having become aware of his actual current weight, he was able to stop the inner stammering dialog that happened every time someone inquired about his weight, whether that was his wife, a friend or even just himself…

So one less thing had the ability to take him out of the present moment and toss him back out of Awareness of The Now!

The importance of this can not be overstated.  Every time we overcome one of these issues and take away that ability we gain greater understanding and skills that will allow us to maintain a life of Awareness and  Connection with the Dynamic Energy of the Universe and it’s Creator.

Awareness then leads to Acceptance as we acknowledge the reality of a situation.  This is key to our accomplishing any desired change in that situation we may want.  But how do we come to be at peace with a situation that we are at core unhappy about.

All situations fall under one of three categories.

1. Situations that we have no control over.
2. Situations that we have  control over.
3. Situations that are a mixture of things we cannot control, and those we can.

When faced with something that falls in category one, we can legitimately give ourselves a pass.  Accepting that the situation was not of our making doesn’t always mean there is nothing we can do to change things.  So if we allow for things that we had no control over, but take what action is available now we have the perfect basis to be at peace with what is…

Categories 2 and 3 are closely related, because if we had any culpability at all in the actuality of What Is, many people just can’t seem to let themselves off the hook!  This is a forgiveness issue, and will also usually be affecting people’s ability to offer forgiveness to others.  This will further hinder the achievement of joy and peaceful living in Awareness of The Now.

Let’s face it, most things fall into these two categories as we can almost always affect a situation by our actions.  With whatever we are faced with that we are not pleased with, we either did not take action, or our actions were not effective.

The first step to overcoming negative feelings about this aspect of What Is consists of meditating on that old NLP affirmation:  Everyone is doing the best they can with the resources available to them.

This includes each and every one of us.   I challenge anyone to really meditate on this and not come away being more at peace with What Is; In The Now.

Whatever we have or have not done that added to our current predicament occurred while we were faced with other complex situations.  By no act of will can we separate out the influences of those past moments in time.  To even go back and try is to take ourselves our of the present moment. Acknowledge this, and you are most of the way to a peaceful acceptance of your own culpability and present situation.

Am I saying that retrospection is always a bad thing?  That we should never try to learn from our past mistakes and errors of omission?  Absolutely not, but I am saying that to do so in even a slightly obsessive way is not only counterproductive but dangerous, and toxic to our Awareness and Presence in The Now.

Be Aware of all aspects of your situation without denial or obfuscation.  Accept whatever your own role is in any aspect that is not to your liking, and forgive yourself.  Acknowledge that you were “Doing the best you could with the resources available to you.”

This will allow you to accept what is openly and take appropriate action while still enjoying a peaceful existence in the present moment at all times.

Please share your thoughts on this post below!

Jim

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