Faith is more than a set of beliefs there is no evidence for or a doctrine of religious beliefs. Faith is a force. It is an aspect of your personal will power that you can use in various ways. One way to use the power of your faith is to invest it in conceptual ideas. [...]
Archive for the 'Happiness' Category
Waking up to the unconscious beliefs in your mind is an unconfortable and disconcernting realization. Realizing your unconscious beliefs have been leading you in a dream world of unnecessary emotional reactions, and sabotaging behaviors, all based on illusions in the mind is confusing and we often react with judgment and denial. It can also create [...]
Most fears are not rational. When we apply some skilled common sense and awareness to them we can detach. However applying reasoning skills to overcoming fears is an uphill battle. That’s because the emotions we feel push us against accepting truthful reasoning. That’s because our fictional, or false beliefs often make us feel better [...]
There is a structure of beliefs that support the fear of what others think of you. When you dismantle these beliefs, your fear dissipates, as well as the internal dialog that it drives. In this podcast I guide you through some of the resistance you will probably find when you attempt to overcome your fears.
Overcoming [...]
David started the Self Mastery audio program because he discovered some things about himself that he didn’t like. It was principally the emotions and behaviors of jealousy, anger, and being controlling in relationships. He had been doing it for more than 25 years but was not aware of it. It was difficult to see himself [...]
I cover how to use awareness to break free of fearful resistance to taking action. Jut for fun I also get into understanding origins of the financial crisis. Credit default swaps, lobbying by banks to lower their equity reserve requirements, and speculation is not what caused the financial bubble and subsequent meltdown. These changes in [...]
Dealing with and overcoming financial fears isn’t a one step process. Those fears can be intertwined with real survival needs for the body like food, shelter, and providing for your children. Financial fears can also be from projected scenarios in the imagination that have nothing to do with reality. The imagination is a big source [...]
You can change your life, but first you have to change your beliefs. Beliefs are those mental constructs that drive our emotions of fear, and sabotaging behavior. In this interview I follow up with Holly who I interviewed in early 2007. She has continued to practice the exercises in the Self Mastery program, and added [...]
Fear is at the core of anger and aggression. Yet we become so busy with the strategy of control and the act of aggression we rarely see the cause. We can see the emotional dynamic at work whether we look at our internal thoughts, relationships, or the macro relationships of countries. The basis if [...]
If the emotional quality of your life and relationships were solely dependent on how smart you were then you wouldn’t need a teacher. But that isn’t the case. A book can’t teach or model for you self acceptance, respect, love, or gratitude. Being happy in this chaotic world isn’t based on how smart you are. [...]
All self help, personal development, growth, and self awareness work is part of the Spiritual Journey. That’s because Spirit Means Life. And all of these endeavors should have an intent to facilitate greater happiness in your life. The mystery of the Spiritual Journey is that it happens within in [...]
Overcoming Addictions and Changing Habits
People attempt to change a habit or addiction by going cold turkey. This often raises the expectation too high and can set a person up for failure if they don’t yet have a lot of personal power or discipline. The result is failing and self judgment. That can [...]
Self Judgment is the most common type of abuse. It’s self abuse. No one is more critical of you than the voice in your head. If anyone else talked to you the way the Judge in your mind spoke to you, you would fight back, or walk away from them. We [...]
The Importance of Keeping Your Faith
What is Faith? What is a Belief? What is the relationship between your emotions and what you believe? Do thoughts have power? Why it’s not that important to stop your negative thoughts. How can you recover your personal power? How do you [...]
Finding your Self or figuring out who you are is one of those eternal questions. We often struggle with it as teenagers, then again in our thirties, or during a mid life crisis. The struggle to know thy Self is as old as spiritual traditions that attempted to answer the question.
Listen to this [...]
Do you have free will? Is there even such a thing as Free Will? It is true that we are to some degree products of our environment. Our minds get filled with ideas, beliefs, and emotional patterns as we grow up. We are socialized to become a collection of habits and [...]
How can you tell if a relationship will work out? There are specific indicators to tell if your relationship will run into trouble down the road. The signs aren’t found in how much love, romance, or physical attraction there is. Two people can have great chemistry but still not be compatible.
How to [...]
How to Not Take Things Personally
In the book, The Four Agreements, Miguel Ruiz outlines a code of conduct for creating love and happiness in your life. One of his Four Agreements is “Don’t Take Anything Personally. In this podcast I describe some of the hidden assumptions that cause us to take things personally. [...]
In a Four Agreements workshop I shared a model for understanding consciousness and the ego mind. I recorded the workshop and part of it makes up this mp3 audio podcast. Understanding the ego mind and understanding consciousness means becoming aware of the way our mind dreams. The ego mind has more than just thoughts and [...]
I often get asked if people can really change their life. They want to known if they can overcome fears, stop the judgments, and quiet the voice in their head. The answer is yes. However, when people ask, they usually ask with such fear and doubt that almost no amount of words will suffice. Perhaps [...]
It might be hard to believe that we fear love and happiness, but it is a real dynamic that happens in the mind. It is easier to understand if we consider the mind to be a living being with many different aspects. If we attempt to change our beliefs and behavior, then we are making [...]
Overcome fear by gaining mastery over your core beliefs.
Fear is that emotional force that drives us in a direction away from joy, happiness, and love. Fear can paralyze us to the point that we feel helpless and suffocated. Often fear appears irrational, but it only looks this way at the surface. When you scrutinize the stories [...]
What are core beliefs and how do you identify them? That’s what many people are realizing they need to do to change their emotional reactions. The problem is where do you look to find core beliefs? They are in the mind but can be hard to pin down, particularly when it is [...]
Ask Gary
Gary,
A friend of mine, Alice, broke up with her boyfriend. When I talked to another friend on the phone (she also knows Alice) I told her that Alice and her boyfriend broke up. Of course I asked myself the question: why am I sharing this info with my friend? Would this be gossiping? So [...]
Understanding Conflicting Desires
Our body has physical desires, our emotions have a desire to express love, and our mind has a desire to have its beliefs and expectations met. This can create some internal conflict that gets more complicated when we add another person’s desires to the mix. The desires from the body and emotions are natural and [...]
Understanding Desire and Yearning in Relationships
Desires for a relationship come from deep within us. They aren’t desires for a specific person so much as a need for expression and experience of connection and feeling that we can have with another person. Those desires include the emotion of love, physical affection, and sexual satisfaction. It is [...]
An audio course subscriber who had dissolved many of her beliefs about her body, and her body image wrote in with the following question.
Dear Gary,
How do you care enough about your body in order for it to be healthy, without getting too stressed about it?
Dear M,
TREAT YOUR BODY LIKE A DOG!
Treat your body like you would [...]
Money can buy comforts and our comforts can help keep the mind distracted from fears that eat away at our happiness.
Money doesn’t buy happiness. Happiness is an emotional state. From one point of view inanimate objects can’t create emotions within us. The things money can buy does allow us to occupy our mind with things that we love. [...]
Inspiried by Tim Boucher’s blog article on fear and power and way too much time in front of the computer screen.
I’ve observed that many people who seek power do so out of self created fear. Their mind drives scenarios of misfortune. Without awareness, they invest belief in their imagined stories and create fear. Their imagined [...]
Dear Gary,
In a situation like the one I am going through (overcoming jealous and controlling behavior that is alienating my partner), how do you avoid overcorrecting too far the other way. You want to avoid being passive aggressive so you hold back on what you say and do. But you don’t want [...]
Most people spend their whole lives looking for some measure of happiness. Why is it so elusive? What creates happiness? People will tell you that material things or other people won’t make you happy. Experts will advise you that in order to be happy you first have to make yourself happy. What they usually can’t [...]
When it comes to stopping or changing emotional reactions people often approach the problem like they are fixing a car. They ask, “How can I change this reaction?” or “How can I stop my jealousy, anger, frustration etc.” The assumption seems to be that if we change one thing the whole problem will go away. [...]
I had a few thoughts on a post Steve Pavlina wrote about the Law of Attraction. I look at it a little differently. Maybe it is really the same but I am interpreting the words differently. This is always a difficulty with language, particularly with written words.
Steve writes: “The Law of Attraction simply says that you [...]
Of don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements most people will say that the hardest one to keep is Don’t Take Anything Personally. I don’t agree. The most challenging agreement is actually Be Impeccable with Your Word. In taking something personal you take what someone said and express an interpretation that makes it personal. We invest our faith in the [...]
I wrote an article about feeling not good enough. It relates to issues of insecurity. A big component of feeling insecure is the image of perfection that we create in our mind. When the voice in our head compares us to that image of perfection it concludes that we are not good [...]