I was contemplating on going to bed but had to get this out of my mind and into print as it was demanding I give it voice. What you may ask was “demanding” voice from me? As I go through life, and grow through life, I have born witness to many startling revelations that slap me so hard my ears ring, and that is the pain and pleasure of personal growth. If you have read some of my previous blogs you will have come to realize I love spending time in deep introspection and enjoy unraveling the fabric of ideas, beliefs and supposed ridged mental constructs. The reason for this “hobby” of mine is that I have come to realize, and have been illuminate by numerous scientist, sages and philosophers that things are not always as they “are”, things are more often as we “believe” or “think” them to be.

This lateral thinking simply said, as it has been said thousands of times for thousands of years, our beliefs create our reality. So...

 I am a firm believer, or until shown otherwise, that motive is king. What I mean by this is that why we begin something or perform an action is often more important than the actual act in most cases, because if the motive is flawed or rooted in any form of negativity then the life span of the act may be limited. Okay, I will stop being cryptic here. What I am referring to is primarily two areas in life, though it might apply to more, is personal development and weight loss. What is the motive behind personal development, to improve on an already existing set of skills and awareness’s or to make us better people (which would lend to assuming we were not “better people). If we maintained that we needed to “fix” ourselves by reading this book, taking this course, then the motive comes from a place of lack, and the fallout of that is a never-ending series of books and courses that perhaps will never end, because our initial premise of motive was one of...

I am reading a great book that I had read some time ago but had not picked it up for some time. The book was "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. Viktor was a psychologist in the Nazi Death Camps, having laboured in four camps including Auschwitz. As one goes through the pages reading the encounter of a man who had everything taken from him, his brother, his parents, his pregnant wife, Viktor maintained that one cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. An astounding account in the book showed a camp block warden confided in Viktor that he had a dream that they would be liberated on March 30th. As the man shared his dream and excitement of the impending release, but as time drew nearer the news that the war showed no sign of slowing down, and on March 29 the block warden suddenly became ill, and the following day, March 30th, he died. The loss of hope was translated to his immune system and since...

I have always wondered why in nature we can see the beauty in the most abstract things yet in our human experience of each other we often view or judge the ones who are “not the same” as us as some how less than, as if there was some unwritten code of conduct or self expression that we must adhere to. I think for the exception of issue dealing with moral conduct and the harming of another, should we not be allowed to be freely expressed as long it does not do harm to another or to ourselves? I think some of the challenges we face in our ability to be self –expressed is we may be lacking in certain areas that inhibit us from truly opening up and being free. One of the areas that many people lack nowadays is their physical health, and being diminished in their ability to fully self expressed on that level. Our ability to think, feel, move, be independent, relies heavily on our state of our health, from our muscles and organs, from our internal bio-chemistry, to the...

I know I have heard this expression before perhaps spoken in different ways, but this time it really landed on me. It draws out of me aspects of my spiritual beliefs, my scientific inquiry into life, and my own personal journey of growth and understanding. So what does it mean, we are not our circumstances? What are the circumstances being referred to? In my own experience, which is all I can speak from, my circumstances of not finishing school in my mind meant that I was not smart, that I couldn’t learn, and would not amount to anything. My growing up in a dysfunctional family I thought meant I was unworthy, damaged goods, not fit for human consumption. All the errors, mistakes, misjudgments in my thinking, the wrongs against others I committed I thought meant that I was a bad person, unlovable.

These mental constructs of our life’s circumstances, or what are often called, meta-programs, do not hold any truth to them, they just hold experiences of our life, which may or...

We have been called creators in our own right, meaning that we have the ability to affect reality in a very profound way. This is done the changing of our thought processes, our belief systems, which in turn alters our behaviors, which changes the outcome of our reality.  The famous quote stated it so perfectly “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”.  The challenge that I and so many of us have is for the vast majority of our life we have lived with certain realities for so long we believe it to be the only available reality, not even daring to believe it could be different.
What happens when the walls come down and the reality you tried so hard to build comes crashing down? Physicists have a concept called “dissipation of entropy”, which means that when a system has reached a breaking point when it must evolve, it goes into a chaotic state, then evolves into a more powerful version of its former self. Once we...

“The world within your mind you think no one can see. The false veneer of your smile and the pretense of happiness you declare your life to be. But the awaken mind can see the world that surrounds you is dark and grey and unknown to you. Your inner world has made it that way

I wrote the above to highlight the importance of daily reflection. When your life seems out of control slow down and center yourself, take the time to relax your mind and decide how you wish to be in this moment. Take slow deep breaths and say something like the following in your mind : I AM in control, I AM relaxed and on purpose, I AM noticing how good I feel, I AM receiving help from the universe that surrounds me.

It is important to realize that though you may try and resist the chaos in your mind, it will find expression in your outer world. The harder you try to resist it the more powerful it becomes so try and relax your mind and decide how you wish to feel, how you wish to be. When you reach a...

Do you know that the fitness industry is the only industry where you can pay money for a result, fail to get that result and blame yourself! Just think, if you saw an ad in the newspaper for car repair, and after you got it back it was either in the same condition or worse you would probably be upset, so why not with fitness? Now to be fair, part of this equation certainly sits on the shoulders of the person seeking better health, but there lies equal responsibility on the person providing the service, otherwise, what are we selling? I think there are fundamentally only a few big obstacles that prevent people from achieving their fitness goals, both of which the trainer and the participant bear some responsibility.

So, are you interested in know what they are?? Let’s start with you, the participant. There are two main things that lay solely on your shoulders and they are consistency in adopting the strategies that are being introduced to you by your trainer...

The road to the enlightenment, the path to joy, the search for happiness, all these “quest’s” for something different than we are currently engaging in seems to be the “stuff” the world has been caught up for the last thousand years or so. Every teacher discusses their methodology on how best to make this happen, the right rituals, the right mindset, the right god(s) and even the right place. When I look at the hundreds of books that adorn my shelves, I see the search I have been on myself for the past two decades and wonder why I am not further ahead in my quest, or am I? Is the arrival at “enlightenment” supposed to be connected with the blaring of horns, the sudden deep sense of relief that I made it!!

Or is the journey more about being “self aware” and having the mindfulness to realize when we are full of shit and just running our game, and that we can be “truthful” to our own motives and have the mental capacity...

As I sit on my flight waiting to touch down I was giving some thought to “where to from here” in respects my career, my sense of contribution to the world, and how I wish to “be”. I am sure like so many of us, I had buried my true desires of what I had hoped to accomplish or be for fear of ridicule or failure, if fact I had buried them so deep I wasn’t aware of what they were anymore. I had invested much of life repressing these desires, the desire to be someone who lives in the flow of their own personal genius, partial due to the messages I had received growing up and once I was convinced that the message were correct, I had spent the rest of my life proving them right. Crazy isn’t it!

20 years ago I purchased my first set of “personal development” audio cd’s from Tony Robbins called “Get the Edge”, and I listened to them in my car every day for months and months. I loved his message but I wanted to know more. I...