The animated movie Madagascar has popped into my head this week. I found that this movie described how cement covers our Golden Buddha, which is “Not Natural” to our true selves. Every species on our planet has a purpose in life, and so do we. But like the characters in Madagascar, we were molded into a false concept of who we are (or what we should be) by societies ideas of what we should be. It’s like we’re acting a part of some fictional character, and in a sense without even realizing it.
Although I may not know what I want out of life, but with the help from MKMMA, I am believing that I’m having more and more of a understanding and awareness of who I am as in my true self.
The challenge for me is still my sits. Not sitting for 15 minutes for say, but finding that one quiet spot that I could go to, away from the everyday noise, ether if it’s off TV, emails/facebook/twitter, cellphones, generally technology, Magazines, news, and other media, people talking in the other room, dogs barking, cats playing and so on. The closest way for me to eliminate that outside racket is to put on mellow music with no singing with my headphones on. However that’s a contradiction…. its still noise.
Where I am right now in my life, it’s rather hard to go into complete silence for 15 minutes, yet alone the exercise of a few days of good ol’ quiet solitude. I am all in for doing it, but trying to figure out how to make it happen is seemingly impossible at the moment.
“Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune
After reading this of Self‐Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson – 1841, I immediately thought of this part of Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Ring
I have been reviewing my DMP, and how does it fit with my true self. The thing is that it’s still feel really clunky and off for me, even after reading it for 3 times every day. I have a real strong sense of who my “Future Self” is as an individual, but a lot of the Future Stuff and Events that is in my DMP feels out of place, or it’s not me as in now or in the Future Self sense.
It’s not that I don’t find anything about attending events, or going to new places I would love to go, or having a new place to live in ISN’T what I desire. I simply find it easier to view myself now and in the future tense, as whom I am as a person, and not by the stuff, events, and/or status that is in my DMP.
Quite frankly it was kind of a weird, but amazing week for me. For what ever reason I was feeling down and depressed, and I have been noticing that I have been catching myself settling for less. BUT I have been replacing these negative thoughts with what I am aiming for in my DMP & positive feelings without much effort! I know my old blue print is still lingering, but a more positive blue print is starting to counter react that old blue print with a lot less effort and faster than before.
I can’t exactly name a BIG one, but just in subtle everyday things. I haven’t been stressing over daily tasks like I typically do, like blogging, or meeting new people. Or getting pissed off about a ‘Service’ as much because I felt like it’s a time waster (although it’s technically not).
For example, I absolutely love cooking, but I felt I had better things to focus on than washing dishes. How can washing dishes be a waste of time when you need them to cook and eat with? It takes a lot longer and is more frustrating to have to stop and wash a spatula or frying pan while in the process of making a wonderful meal instead of having them all clean and ready for use before even starting to cook.
I’m beginning to understand that one of my old blue prints slogans was:
For this week on The Franklin Make Over exercise, I am focusing on Discipline. Although I do consider myself pretty disciplined in a lot of aspects of my life, I find that I am not disciplined in other parts of my life that I feel are important. This makes me feel guilty and I hate saying this but…unworthy. I suppose its more of a lack of focus of what I find important in life that I wanted to be disciplined on.
This is why I think I am more like the fox than the hedgehog mainly because I am guilty of “multitasking” and getting distracted with less important things pretty easily, instead of focusing on what I should be doing to work towards my PPNs and/or my DMP.
Doing the Paired Comparison does help, and I don’t think I am as bad as I was at the beginning of this MKMMA journey, but my old blue print seems to be holding me back in this area of my life.
I am wondering to if there’s some sort of level of fear of success that is play, maybe a White Personality Trait that if I can’t do it perfectly, why do it at all.
I had an aha moment about my stressing over completing my blog post. I haven’t missed a blog post or the posting deadline since starting my MKMMA blog. I find I’m stressing over it because of the fear of losing my posting streak. I feel responsible for taking care of it and I had this false belief that if I slipped on not doing something I am responsible for (even if I only slipped once) I would be branded unreliable.
I want to point out to that doing my blog is one of my most challenging tasks for me. I take hours to write a single blog post, not to mention that I’m a slow reader. Not only because I simply am not sure what to write about for the week but, I believe my stressing over it is a big contributing factor to my writers block these last few weeks. I believe this is one of my White Personality traits of trying to be perfect, failure is not a option.
This is a pretty big topic to think about, I have so many things bouncing around my head about how Fear, Hurt Feelings, Anger, Guilt and/or Unworthiness can be used as tools of expanding my comfort zone. The first thing that comes to my mind is the scene in Adam Sandler’s movie “The Waterboy”. When Bobby (Adam Sandler’s character) discovered he has a unique tackling ability and becomes a member of the football team by letting out a streak of anger aka “Opening a Can Of Whoop-Ass” that was triggered from his hurt feelings towards his mother, when one of the football players was teasing him how dumb he was.
Another thought was the video clip I shared back in Week 18 on this blog with Oprah Winfrey and Tony Robbins, about the story that we base everything on. We’re not following our dreams because we are stuck in fear. We don’t allow our story to evolve. Then we wonder why we are left feeling depressed, bored, and stuck in the same spot in life, suffering in silence, and covering ourselves with new cement blocks over our Golden Buddha.
The biggest one for me personally is when I started MKMMA. At the beginning of this journey, I never really had a strong sense of direction, and not sure what I wanted to do with my life. You could say that I didn’t really like meeting new people either. A lot of these things were pretty big concrete blocks that was covering my Golden Buddha, that now I find pretty silly.
I use to feel guilty when I watched a movie or play video games because I felt that I could of invested that time more wisely. I felt anger mainly because I felt like I didn’t have enough time in the day to do the things I wanted to accomplished. Being a white personality, I feared that I may screwed up on a project for school or work and look like an idiot. I shy away from people that I’ve never meet before because I feared not just getting my feelings hurt, but getting hurt period. The list could go on. Throughout MKMMA, I become a better observer on what I felt and think about. Of course there’s always something to improve on about ourselves, but it is a far cry from where I’ve been.
The Week 19 video had really hit me over the head…. feels kinda familiar….
It felt like a hit in a head because I do a lot of Low-Power Poses and I hadn’t really noticed that I was doing it. It didn’t even occur to me that it had such an impact on how I feel until I watched it!
Since then, I’ve been doing the “Wonder Woman Pose” or stretching my arms out (almost in a way like Jumping Jacks, but without the jumping). I’ve been doing that as well as other High-Power Poses, especially before I do my daily readings. It felt embarrassing and awkward. I say ‘awkward’ because I don’t recall ever doing that kind of posing before. As well,I’ve been doing my posing alone in a private place. It still felt a bit embarrassing.
On the upside, I am very astonished how uplifted I felt even after doing it for a few minutes, I felt more gratitude doing my flash cards, have an easier time reading Scroll V, Definite Major Purpose, The Blue Print Builder and so on.
As for the ‘Services’ I use to dread, I even experienced even MORE Joy and Enthusiasm (which is a part of my DMP), and that’s just doing these High-Power Poses for only a few minutes.
I even catch myself when I feel a bit irritable or overwhelmed, I stop what I am doing and take a few minutes to do my “Wonder Woman Pose”… despite feeling awkward. After that, I almost feel like I drank a couple cups of energy. I find it a pretty phenomenal exercise that I could integrate easily within my day.
In Scroll V, it states “I will waste not a moment mourning yesterday’s misfortunes, yesterday’s defeats, yesterday’s aches of the heart, for why should I throw good after bad?”. This was the line I was hearing in my head when I watched this YouTube clip with Oprah Winfrey and Tony Robbins when Oprah said “Everything is based on your story, and that most people are stuck because of the story they told themselves 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, and your still living out of that story, instead of allowing your story to evolve.”
As Tony Robbins explains, You can’t access the answers as long as you have a story that says it’s impossible, or that will never work, or I’ve tried everything, or I can’t be that, and so on. Kinda sounds like our old DMP. As Tony also said “We all know the power believe you can change our bio chemistry. But we don’t really realize that often that the story might even be true. It might be true the your right, might be true that you went through hell, but that’s not why you have what you want today. That is horrific, but that’s not what is today, that’s the reason you’re giving, cuz you’re just deathly afraid it’s what it is going to take to do it today.”
Therefore the only thing keeping me from getting what I want is the my old story or my past self talk (aka Old DMP) that I kept telling myself about why our New DMP can’t happen or won’t happen.
During this week I have noticed that I have become more and more laid back, and not as stressed over the things I need to get done, like I was when I started MKMMA. The way I am now makes me think of how laid back Adam Sandler’s character Longfellow Deeds from Mr. Deeds is.
Where as before I started MKMMA I was more like Thaddeus Plotz, the height-impaired, hot-tempered, money-grubbing, picky and stubborn CEO of the Warner Bros. Studios from the cartoon Animaniacs. Little things would irritate me. I would stress over how I would accomplish things I wanted to do, get cranky because I thought doing chores was wasting my time that I could be doing something else. Whether it was a simple chore like washing the dishes, or completing a school exam. Even entertainment left me feeling guilty because I felt that I should have been ‘working’ instead of enjoying myself.
I had absolutely no balance. Never satisfied. Hard to please. Never happy. But now things are different. Even with all the extra stuff I have added to my day with the readings and sitting and MKMMA activities, Im getting more accomplished and have much much more balance in my life and a lot less guilt about taking some me time.
This week I was pondering more on the things I think about and that I find, in all honesty, pretty idiotic. Maybe you have a few of these thoughts yourself. Those moments you decided NOT to do something because you thought “Somebody does that better than I can.” or “Somebody else is doing that already, so why should I do the same thing?”
I notice that I have those kind of thoughts and that makes it sound like life is some sort of competition, although it really isn’t.
Another thought I have had “Since I don’t have something as good (if not better) than what somebody else has”, I sabotage myself to think that I couldn’t do as good of job as that guy did simply because I don’t possess the external stuff that the other person has.
It’s like the “You Complete Me” scene in Jerry Maguire that Mark was referring to in the last webinar. It was like me thinking “I need this_______ before I can _______” or “If I only had ________. ”
In actuality, I don’t need anything new to start something. I already have the things I need to start moving towards accomplishing my Definite Major Plan right now. As for somebody that is already doing something similar that I’m doing (or interested in doing), I remind myself of the line in Scroll IV “Salesman and goods, different from all others, and proud of the difference.” Ya they may have stuff that could make my job easier and better in a lot of ways, compared to what I have at the time being, but it doesn’t mean I can’t do something AND succeed nevertheless.
