I’m happy that you’ve found happiness.

It really doesn’t matter which direction it comes from, happiness is to be celebrated.

If you just won the Super Bowl and I lost, I’m happy for you.

Yes, I may be sad for me, but as I said, “Celebrate happiness.”

When you celebrate happiness, you are celebrating a feeling inside, not a set of events. Every time you spot happiness, it’s the happiness in you that recognized it.

When you celebrate happiness, you cultivate that feeling within you. Happiness belongs to everyone, not just the others you see enjoying it.

If you’re at the airport and you see family members or lovers gleefully greet each other at the baggage claim, take a moment to silently celebrate with them. When you take time to notice, you are calibrating your “Happy Meter.”

The side trail you want to avoid is the internal conversation about happiness. “Look at those people; they are so happy. If only I could be like them, but that will never happen for me.” That’s envy and dejection, neither of which leads to happiness.

Get in the habit of noticing happiness.

Another pitfall to happiness is dictating the direction from which it’s to come. (A formal sentence not ending in a preposition).

“I can only be happy if such and such happens.” That’s a life sentence of waiting which postpones happiness indefinitely.

Everyone’s happiness belongs to you if you notice it and celebrate it.

There is not a lack of happiness; we’ve just convinced ourselves that it can only happen if a certain set of circumstances are in place.

You may be unhappy about something and it’s useful to notice that as well. Many never feel their unhappy feelings fully, so they can never metabolize them. They keep pushing it away and it just patiently waits and comes back another day.

Unmetabolized unhappiness is drama which always stands in the way of feeling happy.

Yes, we will have many unhappy moments in our life. Feel them fully and they will let go of you much sooner.

We also keep our unhappiness around much longer when we fail to celebrate happiness.

Nothing is true unless it’s true for you. Don’t believe what I’m saying; put it to the test. Celebrate happiness wherever you see it and notice how quickly more of it comes your way.

All the best,

John

LOSE WEIGHT & KEEP IT OFF
STOP SMOKING FOREVER
SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT EVERY NIGHT
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The Grasshopper hopped right onto my bed late, last night and said: “Truth is a one-way street.”

I had to sleep on that.

Seems we all claim to have the truth about something, when, in fact, all we have is an opinion or a preference.

If you and I have a different truth about the same thing, it can’t possibly be the real truth because the real truth has no opposite.

In fact, the real truth can’t be described in words we can argue with.

You can know the truth but you can’t explain it – only what it’s not.

The truth is never about being right.

There is no smugness attached to the truth. There are no tit-for-tat arguments about the real truth because it’s never a set of facts.

You’re not going to find truth in the legal system or the political system. That just gets you a consensus of opinion.

The closest we come to defining truth is attempting to explain reality. What shows up on a moment to moment basis is the result of truth.

Reality is the child of truth.

Truth is the backdrop to our lives. It’s always there in its unformed essence ready to wear the uniform of reality as it shows up in our daily lives.

Unlike our version of the truth, real truth has no agenda.

My sense is that real truth is our life force – whatever it is that animates us. That life force goes by many names and the one that seems to get the closest for me is truth.

No one has cornered the market on truth because it’s impossible to corral it. That doesn’t mean we can’t use it to our best advantage.

To get access to the truth we have to let our thoughts calm down and make a path for it to show up in our mind. And even though we get thoughts about it, we can’t fully explain it. It’s like the vivid dream that fades away with each waking moment – the details become fuzzy. But we know that feeling.

So you have to go inside for the truth to come out. That means that your thoughts about it have to calm down so you can experience the real thing. When you experience the truth on a regular basis, there is no more need to win the argument about truth.

The one-way The Grasshopper was implying is that truth doesn’t go in; it comes out. We don’t tell ourselves what the truth is and then it forms. It’s the other way around. The truth forms and shows up in our reality when we make a space for it by letting go of our preformed notions about it.

You’ll never hit anyone over the head with the real truth because truth is not a weapon. It’s more of a quiet knowing that can be trusted. Catalogue the feeling you get when you experience the life force known as truth so that you’ll be able to distinguish it from a set of facts with which to attack.

No one will ever adequately define truth; we can only feel it infuse our lives.

All the best,

John

LOSE WEIGHT & KEEP IT OFF
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SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT EVERY NIGHT
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Call me impatient, but I don’t like to wait.

I could easily blame it on my years in the military where the notion of “hurry up and wait” gained notoriety, but upon further inspection this dislike was alive and well before then.

I’m sure some of it is hard wired but most of our impatience seems to be nurtured.

Men are more impatient than women – just sayin’.

Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the area of answering questions. We men have been conditioned by our cultural forces to have an instant answer. It may not be the correct answer, mind you, but we’re sure as hell going to give it to you fast.

Women are certainly catching up, but men have been cultivated into the role of decision maker. We are expected to make decisions everyday and we don’t disappoint, we decide. We are expected to solve problems, and the quicker the better.

The hardest thing for most men to learn is the art of waiting.

There is an old management axiom that underscores the wisdom of patience. It basically says, “Some problems will solve themselves, if you just wait.”

“Grabbing the bull by the horns” is certainly a popular strategy, but applied too often can produce results that can be rather gory. Reminds me of a story . . .

Years ago, I really wanted to fire a guy in the worst way. He had just browbeaten another employee and was acting like a bully. I needed my boss’ approval to let this guy go, so I entered my boss’ office in a huff. I explained what I wanted to do and why. He listened very carefully and asked me a simple question: “Can this wait until tomorrow?”

The answer, of course, was “Yes.”

As it turns out, when I arrived at work the next day, I had two voice mails – one from the browbeater and one from the browbeaten. The essence of the messages was that apologies had been issued and fences had been mended, all without me having to decide.

There is wisdom in waiting – not fence sitting – but waiting.

The wisdom is to wait for the appropriate answer to surface. There will be a number of conditioned answers that come to the top of your mind. Sometimes they work, but oftentimes they gum up the works. You already know from experience what a pre-fabricated answer will get you. If you recognize it as a conditioned response and just let it pass by, you have just discovered the art of waiting.

When you condition yourself to let all the familiar answers parade by, you are perfecting the art of waiting. You may very well select one of those common answers after waiting, but more often than not, you will expose yourself to something new coming from you.

The art of waiting is heavily dependent on trust. You must trust that there is a part of you capable of coming up with a useful answer, if you just wait.

This is not about stalling. That’s a do nothing strategy whose goal is to do nothing.

The art of waiting is reconditioning your mind to allow yourself the opportunity to find an answer you would have never arrived at had you, too quickly and automatically, picked one of your familiar choices.

The conundrum is the art of waiting takes patience. The effort is totally worth it. Here’s a rhyme worth remembering:

Rather than take the familiar bait
Decide to wait and change your fate.

All the best,

John

LOSE WEIGHT & KEEP IT OFF
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If you’ve ever been to some kind of conference in a distant city where you are meeting new people, invariably the small talk includes, “Where are you from?” and “How did you get here?”

“Oh, me and Jennifer drove in from Dubuque, ran into some incredible snow through Kansas, worst I’ve ever seen.” You then answer with your story – “I’m from Rhode Island and our plane must have run into some of that ‘weather’ you experienced because I’ve had smoother rides on Space Mountain in Disney World.”

This get acquainted chit-chat is standard operating procedure to attempt to find common ground. Some do it better than others.

How useful is it to tell that arrival story again and again and again to the same people? Imagine it is 15 minutes or an hour later and that same person tells you their story again. Yes, you may smile politely but you don’t want to hear it. The bigger question is, “How useful is it?”

What’s your “How I got here story?” How often have you told it? And most importantly, have you noticed that it doesn’t matter.

How you got to where you are in life is interesting from an historical and human interest perspective, but it has little to no transformative power to get you somewhere else.

Every time you tell the story, you are there, not here. It’s not possible to get to where you want to go without traveling through here. If you continually go back there, you never transfer to the vehicle that takes you forward – Here!

Where you are now and where you want to go is the only recognition you need.

The incessant trips back through the mud are what give therapy such a crappy track record. To quote my late mentor, Dr. Dave Dobson, “Do you need to go to the dump to remember what garbage smells like?”

Telling how you got here over and over again is like taking a dump in someone’s living room. It’s quite inappropriate and it’s not useful.

Many use how they arrived as a justification for not changing. “I’m the daughter of abusive, left-handed, little people who always called me a ‘Big galoot.’ That’s why I am the way I am.”

That may very well be the sound reasoning how you got here, but hanging on to that story insures that you remain a “Big galoot.”

Retiring your story is painful. Many view theirs as a life preserver. Your story may be shaped like one, but it’s made of concrete and holding on to it will sink you to the bottom.

Letting go of your story is more painful than letting go of an addictive drug or substance. We’ve convinced ourselves our story is who we are and we feel as though we are losing our identity.

The only thing you lose is your story. What you gain is the recognition of where you are now. Here and now is the only place you can move forward from.

Whether you got here by train, boat, plane, or camel, you are here, not there. When you recognize that you are here, that’s a story worthy of retelling.

All the best,

John

LOSE WEIGHT & KEEP IT OFF
STOP SMOKING FOREVER
SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT EVERY NIGHT
IMPROVE YOUR SELF CONFIDENCE
RELAX IN 2 MINUTES
FEEL FOREVER YOUNG
VIRTUAL MASSAGE