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As promised, here is Part II of 'To Live an Extraordinary Life'. If you haven't read Part I yet go and do that first or you'll have no idea what I'm talking about!
Waking someone up in the middle of the night is scary, even if you aren't about to bare your soul to them. Walking up to my friend's door I was terrified. A large part of me wanted to back out, to put it off for another day, a "better" time. But I knew if I left then I'd likely never say it all. I knew that it was too important, he was too important, to let it go even one more day without being said.
I was tired. Buggered in fact (that's the technical term). I'd have been lucky to average 4 hours sleep over the previous 3 nights, and the Forum is a pretty full-on experience (it's not like you're sitting there all day watching the grass grow). But to have used my own tiredness, or the fact he was likely asleep, as an excuse would have been a cop-out. To consider that a couple of hours sleep is more important to me than him is just ridiculous.
I recently had a truly amazing life transformation that I wanted to share with you in the hope that it will inspire you to have one of your own.
It happened thanks to a course called the Landmark Forum that I did two weekends ago. Over the last year I've met quite a few people that have done it, said how fantastic it was and recommended that I do it, though I never really knew what it was all about so I took my time actually "getting around" to it. Now that I have I wish I'd done it 20 years ago! So I hope to shed a little light on it so you can choose whether to have your life transformed too.
I've been doing a fair bit of personal development stuff lately - going to seminars, reading books, watching DVDs etc - and while I've learnt a lot of very useful things I kept on feeling like there was something missing.
What I wanted was something to really help me be present in the moment. What I wanted was a way for my feelings and actions to no longer be dictated to by the circumstances around me.What I found at the Landmark Forum was all this and more.
A gift can be many things. It can be a physical item, such as a book, a cd, a beautiful picture or a golden ring. It can be an event, such as a balloon ride, a surprise party, a night at the movies or a home cooked meal. Or it can be something less tangible, like a compliment, a hug, shared knowledge or a smile.
But have you ever thought about what a gift really is?
True gifts come from the heart. True gifts are love.
When a person is gifting you with something, regardless of what it is, what they are really doing is giving you love. How you treat gifts is a perfect reflection of how you treat love.
When someone offers to buy you a meal do you accept it gratefully?
Or do you reject it and say, "You don't have to do that"?
Of course they don't have to. They want to.
Gifts, and love, don't come from having to - they can only be given freely from the heart.
A man came home one night to find his home burgled. The thieves had taken only a single item; one of his most precious, life-long possessions. He became so distraught he squeezed his eyes shut to escape the sight of the empty place where it once resided. He thought that if he avoided looking at the emptiness he would be able to hold on to the item and avoid the pain of its loss.
Months went by and still the man kept his eyes shut. The outside world was much too dangerous so he mostly confined himself to his house now. These days he felt more accustomed to the darkness, though he still bumped into things now and then. He just took that as par for the course; sometimes you had to suffer a little to avoid suffering a lot.
His closest friends often tried to coax him into opening his eyes, but the memory of finding his cherished item gone still remained so vivid and painful that he never gave in, regardless of how reasonable their requests sounded. With time he started to suspect that his friends made such painful suggestions because they actually disliked him, so he stopped asking them to come over.
Life, reality, is not a tangible thing. We come into this world fresh and ready to learn, and in some ways what we're taught builds some reason out of the strangeness around us. In other ways it blinds us from so much of what is.
We come into this world with the key to living a joyous life firmly implanted in us. Then we put it in a safe place, forget all about it for some decades, and then when we finally decide we want it we can't remember what it was or where we put it, so spend much of our life searching for it!
First we mistakenly believe that the key is out in the world somewhere - in other people, jobs, money, hobbies, religion... you name it, we look for the key to happiness in it.
A friend recently shared a beautiful little story with me that I'd like to share with you.
A Leaf In A River 1
Can I tell you a story about a leaf in a river? We've all seen them, floating along in the middle of the river, gently being carried along by the flow. Funny, really - from there, they cannot be hurt or damaged, since there is nothing but water around, and the water is supporting the leaf. Of course, some leaves are stuck on the bank of the river, with some perhaps unknown force being applied that keeps them there. For the leaf on the bank, the very same current that is supporting the other leaf is now destructive. And yet, if the force holding the leaf is removed, then the leaf that is stuck can now be carried to where it is supposed to be, no longer being buffeted by the vagaries of the current. Unlike a leaf, we can decide to hold on, or to let go.
All too often we put things off for another day, because we're too busy, too tired, too scared, too... fill in the blank. We all have dreams, both big and small, of things we'd like to do, but too regularly we leave them for "tomorrow". But what if tomorrow never comes? What if that thing you put off "just one more day" ends up being put off one day too many, and you end up never again having the chance to do it?
I remember reading a quote some years ago from a forgotten source that stated, "We do not regret the things we do; we regret the things we do not do."
The biggest obstacle in using the Law of Attraction to attract the things we want into our lives are our limiting beliefs. We might want to have financial independence, but we don't really believe we can achieve it. We might want to have a fantastic relationship, but don't really believe we deserve it. We might want to lose 10kg, but don't really believe we'll ever be able to.
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