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Awareness

The Secret to .....

At first, everything is an adventure.

There is so much to explore and see and listen to and do and make and learn and take apart and experience. You reach and crawl and pull yourself up and toddle, investigating your world, awed by the miracles of light and sound and texture around you.

Sometimes you cry and sometimes you laugh. Sometimes you are cross and sometimes you are not. Sometimes you are tired and you sleep and sometimes you are wide awake and ready for adventure. All of life is in you. T…

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The Game Of Life

There are two games taking place.

In the first game, the surface game, let's call it 'Drama', all the twists and turns of the game, all the other characters and events that provide such tension and excitement for the character only serve to make the character more absorbed in The Game.

In the second, hidden game (let's call this Realisation), the same characters and events have an entirely different function: to show that the character is not real, that The Game is not as it appears to be.

Like the…

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'Stress is just your thinking…’… so why can’t I change the thoughts?

An enormous liberation occurs the moment it is realised that reality is not an objective truth. That it changes in appearance, meaning, association, import with the perceiver.

This is huge.

Because up until that point it was believed that the world was exactly how it appeared. There was no space. Life was just a continual attempt to control, manage or deal with an objectively fixed reality.  Until one day, a teacher speaks in such a way that their words create a crack in the concrete and, through …

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What do you believe?

"Beyond our own galaxy lies a vast expanse of galaxies. The deeper we see into space, the more galaxies we discover. There are billions of galaxies, the most distant of which are so far away that the light arriving from them on Earth today set out from the galaxies billions of years ago. So we see them not as they are today, but as they looked long before there was any life on Earth.” www.nasa.gov

Are we experiments in a cosmic Truman Show? A version of the matrix? A creation by an omnipotent God…

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What do we want?

I read an article yesterday about ‘Wantologists’ in America who help people identify exactly what it is they want in their life (link below for anyone wanting to read it). Wantology originated as a process to help businesses make purchasing decisions and is now offered by consultants for individuals.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/opinion/sunday/the-outsourced-life.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

It is easy to scoff at the idea of course and at the ways we are increasingly relying on buying in help fr…

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Stillness or change?

I was teaching yoga to a group of beginners in Amsterdam and about four weeks into the course I introduced a 10 minute meditation session. For all of them, it was the first time they had ever done any meditation. At the end of the lesson we discussed what it had been like. A couple of people said that is was the first time they could remember not having constant mental chatter going on in their minds. This silence only lasted a minute or so of the ten minute session but it was a revelation that …

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Teaching children who is in charge

When I was at the school the other day, a little boy was crying outside his classroom. His teacher was with him but the boy could not talk he was so distraught. The teacher hugged him tightly, then looked him right in the eyes and said very firmly,

‘Who is in charge of your mind?’

The boy was startled out of his sobs. He didn’t know what to say at first. And then cautiously said,

‘I am?’

She nodded. ‘Yes you are.’

Her question had taken him away from what ever had upset him and brought him right into…

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Living in the present

Years ago, I had a phone call to say that one division of our business was in crisis and that in ten minutes the general manager of the market where it had taken place would brief us. It had serious implications for my boss. It looked likely that, as a result of this issue, a programme he had been working on for over a year would not see the light of day.  I went over to tell him. He listened carefully, took in everything I was telling him. As soon as I had finished telling him about the issue a…

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To buy or not to buy

Several years ago I worked in the luxury brand industry, developing marketing campaigns for Johnnie Walker Blue and Gold Label. I went to a seminar on luxury marketing in London and got chatting to a Italian luxury shoe designer. We played a game to test his knowledge. He could tell the brand of shoe that every woman was wearing just from the quickest glance. He worked out that every single woman in that room was wearing a pair of shoes that would have cost over £300. Apart from me.

I started to …

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beware of the Trojan horses

For ten long years the Greeks had been trying to conquer the city of Troy but they could find no way through the high, thick walls. One day, the Greek General, Odysseus, had a clever idea. ‘Let’s pretend that we admit defeat and that we are sailing away. we will leave a gift to announce the end of the war. It will be a magnificent, fantastic horse. A work of art which the Trojans will accept into their city. But inside the horse we will hide 30 men’. The Greeks thought it was a brilliant idea. T…

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