A common mistake many people make when they start something new is thinking now they are doing something special. We start working out, we start meditating, we start eating healthy and think we are doing something special. Millions upon millions of people are doing those exact same things and now they have suddenly become special just because we’ve started doing them. The problem lies in the fact that we want to appear special in the Read more…
Some people that I’ve consulted were very excited when we started working together but over a few months their excitement slowly faded away, eventually died altogether, and was replaced either by boredom or frustration. Those were the idealists – people who are guided more by ideals than by practical considerations. These are the kind of people who have this perfect picture of how things should be or will be even before they’ve had any kind Read more…
So much of our life is lost on needless worries. Especially worrying how long we are going to live. What is it that makes us so concerned about our life expectancy? Life expectancy is nothing but a number and of course, we are obsessed with numbers. It doesn’t matter if it is money, our years, schooling, vacation days, things we possess or don’t possess, you name it. One of our favorite question is probably: “How Read more…
When I hint at meditation to people who I believe could benefit from it a lot of them answer: “Meditation is just too hard for me.” I ask them how they imagine or practice meditation? They answer something like sitting in a very strict posture for a long time and trying to block all the thoughts or maintain a state of empty mind. My response is usually: “That does sound very hard. That would be Read more…
When we think about the term space we usually think of something outside of us such as an empty room, a piece of land, perhaps the Universe, or maybe just a pure vacuum. We rarely think of our inner space – the quality of space within us. Let’s take two people for example. The first person may on a daily basis work, take care of a family, maintain social relationships, maintain his or her home, Read more…
The easiest way to see how perception works is to look at the metaphor with colored glasses. If we put glasses with colored lenses on our eyes everything we will see will be of a certain color. If we put glasses with green colored lenses on for instance everything we will look at will seem green to us. It’s not that everything is green in reality, it just looks that way when we put on Read more…
“How do I start valuing my life?” was a question I received shortly after I published Universal vs. personal values. I wrote in that essay that we often understand the value of a thing only when we lose it. Because when we lose something we have an experience of loss and that experience gives us understanding. But it is possible not to lose something to know what that would feel like. We can ask ourselves Read more…
I received an interesting question regarding my previous writing titled True vs. false values: “What if I have to do something but I don’t want to because it’s not important to me?” Let’s stop right there. When someone says the word “have to” doesn’t he or she already know this is important on some level? I once saw a man in his mid-forties at a shopping mall that was putting the cheapest and most unhealthy Read more…
One of the questions I received a while ago was: “What is the one thing that holds people back most from achieving whatever they want to achieve?” That’s easy. Misguided beliefs and opinions. Beliefs and opinions are not facts, they are the very opposite of facts. Beliefs are nothing more than feelings of certainty and opinions nothing more than inconclusive views – they resolve or prove nothing. So why do we love them so much Read more…
“How can you be so disciplined? How can you do all this stuff like read, train, meditate and eat healthy every day?” is a question I get asked a lot. The answer is it has nothing to do with discipline because I don’t have to force myself to do any of those things I do on a daily basis. I know what my highest values are and just live according to them. It’s that simple. Read more…