How are you feeling today?

We roam the world with a certain attitude, a certain je ne sais qoi.... a certain feeling. If you walk into a department store and look at certain products to buy   you might pay attention to the product itself and be informed about your decisions, but you may not. Research shows we rely heavily on what people say, but mostly we rely on how we are made to feel. Is the attitude of the sales person overbearing or sincere? How does that make you feel at that very moment will actually determine if you buy the product or not. For those of you who are skeptics, just remember the last time you went into to a store in a mall or to a dealer of any kind, and ended up getting some item ( food or otherwise) that you were not expecting. It happens to men and women. Men can go into a hobby store to "browse" and end up with all sorts of hobby related assortments ( dubbed man toys by women). Women do the same and come back with department store  bags of clothes or boxes of shoes all in the name of a "bargain deal." But in reality it was what you felt at that moment that made you eventually stand in line and pull out your credit card or cash from your wallet and part with it and return home triumphantly !!

This is not just the case if you walk into a store, but also shopping online. There is a great deal of time spent by advertisers to make a product look attractive enough to make you click on the " Add to Cart" icon and "Proceed to checkout." They are trying to make you feel good, and positive enough to shop with them despite being devoid of human contact on the computer. Most of us will not remember what people say but what people make us feel that will navigate our journey. For example,  A friend whose opinion you value highly can tell you a negative thing about a doctor and give you THEIR reasons for not going to that doctor. If their emotions are strong enough you can be swayed by it since you will feel their pain, not yours. If the emotions are not as emphatic and do not make YOU feel that way, then you may choose to try out that doctor and render your opinion. Now a different story if you go to that doctor and your preconceived notions of what your friend said, sway your judgements, but more than likely if the encounter is productive one, and YOU feel good after, then your opinion will be your own.

Politicians use this technique all the time, not necessarily with their crowd pleasing false promises in most cases, but it is the emphatic nature of their delivery of those speeches and not as much the rhetoric that will make you feel a certain way and then sway you to vote one way or the other. It is also known as the placebo effect. If I were to look you straight in the eye and tell you that this prescription for lets say a headache will work and make you feel great and I will see you back in a week after you had been cured , odds are that it will work.  On the other hand if I were to give you the prescription with a shifting stance and gaze away from you and say things like " I hope this works...  Lets see......Lets give this a try etc" then odds are the treatment will not work. It is all about the positive or negative spin. 

Another example is that when I walk into a grocery store with a list of things to buy ( I cannot be trusted otherwise !) I have a different experience entirely depending on whether I am hungry or not. If not then  I proceed with great rapidity in completing my list and exit the store. If however I am feeling hungry, then my shopping takes me through every aisle and I end up with loads of cartons of chocolate chip cookies, tubs of ice cream , double chocolate muffins, and bags of chips to name but a few items, all of which was never on my very healthy grocery list written neatly by my wife.

You may say many things and be positive about how you say these things, but do you back it up with action? If you do something equally as good as you say then that has a higher impact on how the recipient feels and remembers. Human memory is faulty. No question. Try recalling a memory from child hood. Your childhood friends will all remember the event slightly differently, and you end up playing a game of Cluedo but no one wins. But positive memories are reinforced by positive feelings and vice versa. Usually this is the work of an action done by someone you care about for example parent, sibling, teacher, friend. Surprisingly enough also the act of random kindness by perfect strangers. Notice what I mentioned.... an act, i.e an action. something that was done, will reinforce the way you felt and the way you remember. Hazing in schools and colleges will most of the time demoralize and instill fear, as words and actions in a derogatory fashion will imprint with negative emotions. Some stranger paying your bill at a restaurant for  no reason or a friend going out of their way to help you, or a parent patiently answering the same question asked by the child for the thousandth time without raising their voice, will all lead to a positive reaction through an action, culminating with a positive feeling, a positive memory and a high probability of performing a positive action. And circle of life continues.

Peoples attitudes on any given day are influenced by a wide variety of factors that play in daily in their  lives. Do not let their attitudes disturb how you feel and interact with your world. Do not let someone else's outlook and negative feelings direct how you then feel negatively and miss out on an opportunity that may come your way, in whatever walk of life. By keeping a positive and open mindset you will stay in the moment and ever present so that you make the right choice, the informed choice. Not to suggest that you walk into a store with a positive jubilant attitude and buy everything in the store ! More over being present in the moment, equipoised, you can steer your ship through the myriad of feelings. 

Winston Churchill once said " A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" He was referring to Russia in 1939 , but he could easily been referring to human emotions of the Russian government or populous.  My personal thought on this  is that  I am an understandable enigma (my soul), entertaining a solvable mystery ( my mind), asking the answerable riddle, Why am I here? (my life).

Just like the feel good commercial says " Got milk?" look at yourself each day and ask: " Got good feelings?"

Going online, going offline, going inline

Connected to the world behind the lcd screen. Connected to each other through texts, emails, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus etc. Shopping has never been easier. Food, clothes, furniture, car, houses, and material goods all available online. The only thing that prevents you from being totally barraged and overwhelmed is a limit on your credit card and more over a reliable search engine with correct definition of what you are looking for.  The other day I wanted to find a unique mug. Try typing "unique mug" in the search box of your browser, and sit back and be prepared to be blown away by the choices displayed in front of you. Then spend the next few hours if not days searching through pages and pages of what the search engine thinks you want, to find what you actually want. How much time do you think is acceptable spending time on line? How much time is acceptable to spend communicating with someone online? How much time and effort is acceptable to spend interfaced with a machine?

Disconnecting from the world and from each other through technology from time to time, is not always a bad thing. It affords us the time to look away from  the computer screen and stretch our eyes, our minds, our hearts in all directions. Take a walk down a forest path or sit in the grass looking at the sky, watching the birds fly or a leaf move in the wind, or goto the local park and feed the birds.  Reconnecting to the world, reconnecting to the nature, reconnecting to the universe. Meet a friend at a coffee shop and catch up. Visit the elderly at a nursing home and spend a few hours connecting with them affording them the opportunity to relive their better past days. Play with a child without direction allowing them to invent themselves repeatedly exploring the present. Goto a local farm and buy your fruits and vegetables, free from commercial bombardment, you will connect to the local farmers and community. 

With the infinite opportunities to shop online, and time spent clicking at choices, it got me thinking what if I spent all that time  investigating the infinite opportunities within. Quiet reflection, meditation, and calming the mind would help me to go through so many more possibilities of myself so much faster. Imagine each of us being the entire internet. Endless potential, endless chances to connect, endless avenues to create. All you need is the right search key word, then hit enter, and you are off to the races. Here are some key words to type in to your personal search engine, when you log in to yourself. Being happy, Love, Connection, Creativity, Peace, just to start you up. If each of us tap into our own internet and bring forth our potential, and collectively harness this power what a world it can be. I see that already we do come together and good human consciousness can build spaceships, space stations, underwater submersibles, musical concerts, art galleries, progress mankind's knowledge of medicine, engineering, science, astronomy, spirituality and of course the internet and the technology behind. So the potential is there, that much we have proven to ourselves. 

Do we dare to go offline, and connect inline, within, and raise our consciousness to an even higher level? Is there even a limit to our potential? I  think not...... 

Snow snow everywhere

Looking outside the window after 2 consecutive storms there is just white. Miles and miles of white. Blinding, brilliant and ever present. Nothing is exempt from it. You get the understanding  of the term weight. It is light in that it is  fluffy, airy. It is heavy as it sits amassing the world.  Too thick to move. Resigned, defiant it glares back at you. The wind catches the roof tops and blows the snow from roof top to roof top as it swirls, your imagination can see faces form in these swirls of translucent particles of icy wind, like ghosts skipping on up high.

The snow seasons representation can be interpreted in many ways.  You can say that life is like the day after the snow storm. Heavy, bogged down like with the pressure of life's stresses, just there to get cleaned and mess up your plans only so you can clean it up again another day, or you can view it as a challenge of exercise in the fresh air. You can see it as an opportunity to downhill ski, cross country ski, or snow shoe. Make snow creatures, have snow ball fights, or go sledging. You can either let the snow get you down, or you can get on top of it. Yet the snow remains just as it is. Your adjectives that are summoned by your mind will change your mood and so your out look on your own life. Do you want it boggy, heavy, full of anger and frustration? Or do you choose to look at the positive and lighter and fluffier side of the same life? 

Just remember like everything in life, this present moment too shall change, nothing lasts forever. Not your physical or emotional pain, not your mental misery, not even your desire for negativity. Come up with new adjectives that are positive descriptions of what you wish to see in your life. The mind is fickle and will convince you of what you see depending on what you think you feel. You will believe that what you see is the truth. Who is leading whom? Who is the controller, you or the mind? Better yet, throw away all adjectives and just be. That way your mind cannot fool or trick you into being led onto any path, and you will then lead yourself and your mind onto the path of truth. 

One might say I cannot ski it is too hard and too dangerous. Your mind will play tricks on you and convince you that it will be the death of you. Yet a free mind, for example that of a child that no knows no fear will prove you wrong as this 4 year old will whizz right past you effortlessly with no poles on a downhill slope. Your mind will then further trick you into thinking, if a child can do it, so can I, and hurtle you down the slope and end your pride abruptly. Skiing like everything else in life takes patient practice, and skill to develop, and of course a leap of faith. The stable mind, sees that skiing is an art, and will guide you to learn appropriately, and once trained go solo. The unstable mind will take you from one extreme to another. 

Snow is snow. Heavy, light, white, bright, thick, or thin.It is what it is. Life is life. Heavy, light, dull, big, small, happy, sad. It is what it is. Just do not be a snowy ghost, jumping from rooftop to roof top in the wind, with no substance, no real existence, no real conviction.