My old yoga teacher and friend Sri K Pattabhi Jois used to say "Every day I teach yoga I get one year younger, but everyday I don't teach yoga I get ten years older" Obviously, given that he was still pretty fit at the age of 90, he taught allot of yoga. He was also, rarely tired,
Exhaustion and lost hope of the future go hand in hand. If I am walking to an event or to meet someone for dinner and I feel tired, it's because deep down at some pretty important level I can't link going to meet that person to my values. In simpler language I am going but there's some part of me doesn't really see the benefit of it.
Our energy systems are amazing. If we have one job to do there are always five ways to approach that job. Two will exhaust you, two will get you through the day and one will absolutely send you home with more energy than you came to work with.
Making love is the same. Sometimes after making love you feel like the world is just bright brilliant sunshine even if it's a rainy day, but other times you just want to curl up and get away from your partner, the world and life. Same love making two different head-spaces.
How we think, has a huge impact on how we feel. People spend allot of time telling you what to think and you may buy it or not. In Back on Track™ I spend allot of time coaching you to forget about what people tell you about what to think and focus on how you think
In this article, which, by the way, is a little lengthy and took longer to write than expected, I talk a bit about HOW to think, rather than what. I'm encouraging those people who find themselves tired at the end of the day to consider a re-engineering, re-invention of their dependency on short term emotional uppers. It's quite confronting. I hope you enjoy, and not enjoy it. (you'll see the humour in that comment as you read on)
Directing Your Energy
In the previous Blog article I spoke about two of the four Key ingredients of a great working day:.Those four ingredients are:
Building Energy
Stopping the Loss of Energy
Storing Energy (to take home)
Directing Your Energy
I gave a quick brush stroke overview of the first two and today I’d like to share the fourth ingredient, directing your energy. I will get back to storing your energy in the next article because it is the single most important of the four.
Directing Your Energy
It’s a well known fact that what you think about, you bring about. So, if we took a movie of what goes in and out of your mind throughout the day, we’d have a pretty good description of where your energy is being directed.
But there’s more to it than what you are consciously thinking about.
There are three unconscious thinking levels that can really suck your energy and it’s important to put them on the table right up front.
Your environment.
When people go to life changing seminars or do mind altering programs they very often return to the same friends, same conversations, same bus routes, same house, same office desk. Now, you will see on the Back on Track™ program, that step three of the personal, business and team change process is changing the environment and it’s one of the most important steps in personal or business change. Why?
Because your environment sends signals to your mind without you knowing it. Advertising billboards are not meant to be seen, they are meant to be not seen because their power is to become part of your environment, slip past your conscious mind and engage your behaviour without you knowing it. This subliminal marketing is not new. Churches have icons, communities have logos, people live in certain suburbs in order to associate with particular environmental subliminal notices, like wealth, or fun or creativity. It’s not new. But in the world of human development is is largely ignored.
An untidy bedroom, a messy kitchen, old dirty underwear, shoes that needed to be thrown out years ago, sox that stink, a watch that’s a duplicate. Proven time and time again in Harvard Business studies to have a huge impact on success, performance and quality of life. The type of pen you use, the way you write your name, the way you hold your coffee cup, your posture and more. These are low hanging fruit in the personal development industry but largely untouched in the big seminars. They are, in my opinion, the single most powerful route to human development and cause the fastest, most permanent changes in work and life.
So, environment draws your attention subconsciously and consciously and therefore is one of the powerful sources of energy sucking distraction.
Guilt
Guilt is such a bitch. It sits under anger, fear, judgement, uncertainty, confusion, self-depreciation, self-sabotage and a whole range of addictions. Guilt is such a bitch because we rarely feel it in it’s subtly. Take a rape victim as an example, often they don’t admit that guilt is a part of their pain because they feel like a victim and don’t imagine they could be guilty about what happened. But in nearly all cases, guilt exists.
Another example of guilt is in violence, hurting someone. The perpetrator often feels remorse or sadness but all too often the guilt sits beneath the surface making them angry and reactive, more prone to re-engage in violence. Guilt is subtle.
Guilt sucks energy and the most important vitality from our bones. It can actually undermine our health.
When I was 3 my mother slid off the front bench seat of the old car we were travelling in and went under the back wheels. She died. I remember people crying at the funeral. 30 years later in dealing with some side issues associated with a divorce, I revealed that subtle guilt about being responsible for all the crying and all the pain by causing or not saving my mother had underpinned a huge portion of my life.
Guilt can steal our energy. In the first step of Back on Track you will see the word DISCARD and this means to let go any unhealthy thinking that might be sucking energy. Guilt is a prime target.
Uncertainty
Why do airplanes fly? Why does grass smell? Why is exercise good for you? Why is too much chocolate bad? Those questions might be irrelevant sitting in a pub having a beer on Bondi Beach, but if you were sitting in an airplane that feels like it’s going to crash, or feeling your heart shift to angina, or starving and all you have is chocolate, the questions of WHY become vital.
Uncertainty comes as an energy sucking vampire because we don’t know what’s going to happen, we don’t know why things happen well or why things happen bad. Uncertainty at work, uncertainty in love, uncertainty in health and more… uncertainty is a vacuum pump sucking the life-force out of every person who holds it.
In Back on Track program, you will notice that steps 4, 5 and 6 are about creating certainty. They involve knowledge and wisdom, vision and purpose, and Inspiration. These are the keys to absolute certainty. Certainty about the future, certainty about the past.
Uncertainty is often subconscious. It deprives the mind of clarity, makes us seek approval from others, robs us of freedom to be ourselves, and makes us second guess our choices, a nasty habit.
Directing Your Energy
Your energy goes where your mind goes and your mind, if left free will go wherever it is distracted to go or finds interest. Therefore, as it’s written in all the great sciences of mind, your mind can be your best friend or your worst enemy.
Mind thinks. It can’t help itself. If it thinks about two things at once, or three, or has the subconscious and the conscious minds dealing with different issues, it becomes another vampire, sucking the life-force out of you. In Yoga this is called Kundalini, it’s the vitality or magnetism that runs through your nervous system. The core of that energy runs up and down your spine, but not as the fantasia yogi teachers think. Let me explain.
I want you to visualise please the your mind being the gear box of a car. Your energy is the engine of the car. With certain circumstances the engine (your energy) roars, lets say, because you ate fish and chips or carbohydrates for dinner, but if your mind is in the wrong gear, the car, your life, doesn’t go very far. You make allot of noise, travel to allot of places, cry, laugh, make love, eat, do exercise but at the end of the day, have nothing much to show for it.
This state of wheel spin, with the engine roaring and the mind in low gear is, in more technical language, called fight or flight. It can feel fantastic but the net output is, well, in less technical language, nothing, really messed up, stressed, overwhelmed, and inevitably disappointing.
So, the gears of the engine, your mind can be fantastic or your worst enemy.
Lets look at an alternative. In the car you normally start off in low gear to get the car moving, so, infatuation usually gets you going in the right direction. But you can only have two hours of infatuation in a whole day, again, because it burns huge amounts of fuel, revs the engine to almost red line, but goes no where. Its exhausting. So, as in a car, the mind has higher levels of thinking, higher gears to get past infatuation.
If fifth gear in a car is redline top speed, love in the mind is the human equivalent. So, loving what you do is the opposite to infatuating what you do. One gets you started, the other keeps you going. When you slow down or lose momentum you drop back into low gear, infatuation to get started again, but only to kick start your engine.
Lets look at infatuation (low gear, high burn rate, exhaustion)
Infatuation is caused when a mind sees 7 times more positive benefits to something than drawbacks, negatives. An easy example is when you meet a new lover and just can’t see a single thing wrong with them. That’s infatuation and it makes you quite sexually active. Of course, in most cases this doesn’t last, and any relationship that starts with infatuation always ends up in the opposite, resentment. So, we propagate the specie, get pregnant with infatuation, and we get bored, angry and divorced with resentment. If we can get past both and put the mind into the “higher gear,” we get a relationship long term.
So, meditation is meant to teach us how to move between the bottom low gear and the top high gear. Not because high gear is better than low gear, no, they both are essential. It’s because low gear isn’t sustainable, causes violence, makes us hate ourselves and others and leads to chaos.
That’s why kundalini, as taught by most yogi’s is so often messed up. They are suggesting high gear is better than low gear because it feels good, but while how the gear feels is important, it’s always low.
The very definition of high gear is when how we feel, “short term gratification” is replaced by long term discipline. And discipline doesn’t feel good. It feels good and not good and until neither becomes important, then we are definitely stuck in low gear.
In Back on Track program you’ll notice that the fifth step is Vision, Inspiration and Purpose. Now this is a vital key because what we are asking you to do is describe a future that makes it worthwhile to forgo some short term comfort for some long term results (high gear).
Now, the key to this is realism. If we are sacrificing short term comfort for long term discipline, the thing we are reaching out for in the future had better be tantalizingly worth it. And this is where it gets tricky. Sorry to make this so damn complex.
If we infatuate the future, in other words get all hyped up about how wonderful it will be, we are not really kicking into high gear are we, instead, we’d be just applying short term, low gear thinking to the future. So, to really engage the future, we need inspiration. Inspiration is the opposite to infatuation. Inspiration means that in spite of their being an upside and a downside to the future, it’s just wonderful.
The key to inspiration are your values. What inspires me, doesn’t necessarily inspire you. That’s because what I value as important and what you value as important are different. (your values are fingerprint specific) There are also really high core values, called intrinsic values (not material) and there are really solid core values, called extrinsic values (which are perfectly material.
Getting your vision, inspiration and purpose to line up, means to prioritise your higher values over your lower ones, and to align your intrinsic values with your extrinsic ones.
Here’s an example of a great vision. Lets say Peter’s intrinsic value is harmony. He loves harmony. When he feels harmony he feels inspired. He feels harmony in gardens, some art, some conversations, some activities. So, Peter’s vision of the future will inevitably include harmony. Of course, there is going to be disharmony too, because there are two sides to everything. Now comes the key: Peter’s extrinsic values are his work, his family, his health, his wealth, his social life and his knowledge in that order. What that means in simple language is that as long as Peter feels harmony in the top three extrinsic values he will be happy to experience disharmony in his lower three.
So, the vision process is not just about sitting down playing with matches and setting fire to some fuse to ignite the future. That always leads to trouble and disappointment. Vision process involves inspiration that is generated out of a deep personal understanding.
When the teacher says “know yourself” - they might imply that they want you to know what toast you like or whether you prefer Red wine or White. But really, to know yourself is just to know your values, your intrinsic, extrinsic and their priority.
To know your values is often complicated by how many books you’ve read, how many tapes you’ve listened to, how much your head has been filled with dogma about should do this and should do that. This is where the whole thing gets bent out of shape. The more books you read about yourself and the more tapes you listen to the more confused you’ll become. The best way to know yourself, and therefore your values, is to go sit under a tree.
Back on Track is 100% nature based. So, instead of jamming more knowledge into your overcrowded mind and telling you what you should or shouldn’t be doing, I designed Back on Track to let your True Nature surface. The fastest way for that to happen is to sit down and shut up, under a tree. Silence is the best teacher.
So, directing your energy means to bring your mind to one single topic and that topic is best linked to your vision. Then, all your energy is creating something rather than being pee’d against the wall being all emotional and infatuated or run by your subconscious (fears and guilts), that’s just exhausting.
To bring your mind to one single topic requires practice. The way we practice is simple:
Sit down with a scent that engages your mind. At the same time sit down with a thought that engages your feelings. At the same time sit down with a sight that engages your mind’s eye. At the same time sit down with a taste that engages your flavors. And now, add a sound that engages your ears. With all five senses focussed your can then focus on one topic and you are concentrating, running in high gear, directing maximum focussed energy and using the least amount of emotional waste (infatuation/resentment).
It takes practice. For the first 20 times just do this for 10 minutes lying on the floor with your head supported. Eventually you can sit up. Eventually you can walk and do it. And, after a while you’ll be able to talk and do it.
With focus and vision, you can direct energy to things you can’t see. These include:
1 Sending energy to a friend who is ill
Sending love to a partner who is at work
Sending kindness to a child who is at school and feeling alone
Sending thankfulness to a parent or sibling
Sending healing to a whole group of people who are in difficult circumstances
Creating and manifesting material wealth
Connecting with clients
There are one thousand more places you can send energy but only if the energy is refined to higher gears of the mind, inspiration and love.
One final note: What comes from the human heart is not love, it is third gear, a middle range gear somewhere between the lowest and highest gear. In plain language the heart is ambivalence. it can never make a decision, because it is always caught somewhere between short term benefit and long term benefit. Those two are usually in conflict and therefore, in our heart, we are in confusion.
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