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 and moral compass to course correct before too much damage has been ...

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 have this issue you see, I hate ambiguity, and when someone says someth...

I spent the past 17 years or so working on my own personal development, reading, studying, listening to audio books etc, trying to find a better way to navigate through life. Funny thing is is that life requires less "efforting" and more faith, less "nose to the grind stone" and more focus on important things. I have discovered, though I am sure I have heard it numerous time before, that success and happiness in life is about letting go, rather than holding on. Happiness and success is a birthright, not a limited time offer to a lucky few. It is a choice that you make where you stand right now.

The other epiphany I had only recently is that my ego, our egos, are nothing more than children (our younger selves) fighting for attention. I should of guessed it before, but like so many of us, I spent time fighting with my ego (internal dialogue aka-head trash) I never took the time to figure out who I was fighting with and for what. Again, I should have realized this long ago, but I had to ...

I have the privilege to spend time with a friend and talk about the things we love to do, the things we look forward to doing, but most interestingly the things we gave up doing due to the judgments and ridicule of others. When we dare to speak about our passion the risk is that others in our life may seek to kill our dreams simply because they have lost sight of theirs. When we speak of what we yearn to do, what our heart beckons us to do, the spark of desire can often be a grim reminder to those who long since gave up their dreams and the pain of being reminded may be to great to bear. In order not to get swept away in remorse, they quickly extinguish our light before the reminder of their lost dreams becomes too acute. I can remember, though only recently, my father’s poor attitude towards my aspirations and dreams.

My father was an incredibly talented man whose knowledge was vast on almost any topic you could broach, but despite his incredible intellect, and despite the efforts he...

I read an interesting passage in a book written by Paulo Coelho “The Witch of Portobello” (there were so many great points I lost count) and it spoke to the human desire to look for the perfect teacher (or book) but though the teachings may be divine, the teachers are human and imperfect which often is a stumbling block for many of us. He went on to say to not confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself. It is interesting that when we pray for guidance, we secretly want to be told what to do, rather than be given signs of the road we must travel. This book evoked a lot of different thoughts in me, reminded me the power of rituals, the power of being present, and the realization of how powerful each and everyone of us are, but we are afraid of our power.

Is it because when we accept our power we no longer have access to the excuses that we have used to justify our lot in life? Why do we not heed the voice of div...

One of the lessons I have learned, or perhaps I should say have begin to apply, is to just flow through it. There are so many strategies available in all the self help books, but at the end of the day we still need to flow through the more difficult parts of our life. Many years ago while still working in my business I realized that if I took the time with my clients, help them rebuild their core strength, help them not only understand it intellectually (mind), but helped them feel it (embody) they could withstand the path forward to being stronger, more flexible and certainly more physically capable. When the physically stressors of sport or day to day life would show up, they intuitively knew how to navigate the challenges and come out the other side with little or no risk of injury, being much more graceful in how they moved.
I took that idea into the mental aspect of who we are, and following the same concept, first understand how our mind works and how the mind can store emotions i...

I was thinking about this today and after chewing on it for a while I had some interesting clarity, or it could total crap, I am sure you will let me know, on why many of us, myself included, do not ask for or reach out for the things we want. I wondered is it because I don’t believe I deserve it, that the why was out my league or was it something else? As I explored the idea a bit more I came across a new awareness that “some of the reasons” not all them, for me not pursing different goals or “whys” was not that I didn’t want them, it was that I was not prepared to deal with the rejection or ridicule that I feared would arise in pursuit of that goal.

This was quite a new awareness of a long-standing problem that was cleverly disguised as “I don’t have the time for that” or “It isn’t really not my thing” or “that looks a waste of time”. So allowing ourselves to be held back by our own negative opinions or the negative opinions of others is tragic. I find that, perhaps like many of ...

I have been listening to an amazing speaker "Brene Brown" who is a qualitative researcher in the area of social work. She became very well-known after her Ted Talks on the topic of shame. What I loved about her message was that she spoke as an intellect, meaning that her message was more objective than subjective, or more simply said, it was information that was based on facts that were qualified as to their validity rather than just a popular opinion that resonated with the masses.

After listening to numerous seminars, audio books, one part really stood out for me, and is was the conversation on why we judge others. During her research, what she had discovered the "judgment" was an occurrence when someone in our world happened to be doing a bit worse than ourselves at that very moment. The judgment was a reaction to the behavior of another, and as Carl Jung so wonderfully stated "that which irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves". If we were in a good ...

One of my long-standing endeavors in life is to figure “shit out” or perhaps more succinctly, try to make sense of the sea of information that we currently find ourselves awash in. For over 25 years I have pulled apart and dug into information on herbalism, applied kinesiology, philosophy, physics, physiology, neurology ect... if has an “ology” on the end of it, I looked into it. The reason I guess for the endless search was a byproduct of finding limitations in everything I read, in that there was not “one thing” that solved everything. But what was interesting was if you were of the right mindset, meaning that you knew what you were looking for, and had an idea of direction you wanted to move in, what you were looking for would eventually make itself known, or not. It seems that it all depends on your point of view and the questions we are asking from that space.  
One author who I have enjoyed reading, Dr. David Hawkins, suggested that “we have not yet asked the right questions becau...