Table of contents for Expanding your mind

1. A loss becomes a gain
2. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten
3. The imagination is more powerful than the will

Your mind has the power to make a big difference in your life. Your imagination has the ability to shape your success. You can use your imagination or let your imagination use you. I come across a lot of people who imagine all kinds of terrible things about themselves - things which are usually not even true. Somehow their imagination has run riot over their self-esteem. They quite often imagine that they are no good for anything or that everything they try is doomed to fail before they begin. This is all rubbish of course it’s just that there mind has made it all up.

Don’t let your imagination do this to you, instead use that power for your own good. Instead of letting your imagination do whatever it wants take control of it and point it in directions where it can help you.

Another word here might be creative, get creative with your mind about the situations you face. When a problem comes along get your creative side working on a solution. When you have an opportunity let your creative side go on planning how you can make the most of the situation.

Your will is so often controlled by what your brain is imagining. Don’t let your imagination bring you down instead force it to help you.

You will find plenty of charlatans who will try to persuade you that they can sell you peace - but they are wrong. Peace is not something you can buy and you can’t get it just by following a new exercise regime or purchasing the latest book about it.

The truth is that peace is something you only get by working at it.

To get peace you need to give yourself a gift of some time

If you want more peace in your life then you need to take some time to get it. Now I know that is is possible to have inner peace even when things seem to be like bedlam all around you but you can’t get that without first of all learning how to do it. So you will need to give yourself some time. I suggest finding at least 15 minutes every day for this. Put it in your diary now.

To have peace you need to be filled with peaceful thoughts

If your mind is full of frantic and desperate thoughts then you will never find peace. You can go to the most wonderful place in the world but if your mind is full of activity then you will not find peace there. The only way to find peace is to put peaceful thoughts into your mind.

You can do this in many different ways. You can use words that are peaceful to help you think in a peaceful calm kind of way - try words like: calm, clear, still, rest, etc. Or you could think about peaceful places you have been to. Or you could make use of a relaxation exercise. Or you could go to someone very peaceful and let yourself indulge in the peace.

Whatever you do you need to get some peaceful thoughts into your mind.

Another way

I hope you will indulge me for just a moment because I want to share a way that I have found peace - a deeper peace than I could have found otherwise. Please don’t think I’ve gone all nutty and religious on you here but I just wouldn’t feel comfortable keeping this to myself when you are searching for peace.

I find that God provides me with a deep inner peace. As a Christian it gives me great comfort and peace to know that God loves me. I still need to think those peaceful thoughts (there is a lot of good stuff in the Bible if you want some extra help on this - if you are not sure where to start then try Psalm 23) but without my faith I don’t get the kind of peace I can get otherwise.

In studies this simple truth has been shown time and again. People with a faith tend to be less stressed than those without. You make your own mind up but I’m happy I have what I do.

Table of contents for Expanding your mind

1. A loss becomes a gain
2. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten
3. The imagination is more powerful than the will

Do you want to be successful? Are you successful now? What are you doing to make yourself more successful? It can take quite a long time for a plan to come together and during that time you need to be persistant. However if you keep doing the same thing over and over again then you will only ever get the same results. If you want something different to happen in your life then you need to do something different.

This is such a simple, yet important, rule that you ought to commit this one to memory.

Let’s say you want to be more successful in life. Well you will only get to be more successful if you do something different.

Let’s say you want a better relationship with someone else. If you always treat that person the same then you will always get the same kind of relationship.

Let’s say you want to get fitter. If you only ever take the same exercise that you always take then you will stay at the same level of fitness.

Let’s say you want to lose weight. If you always eat the same kinds of food that you do now then you will always be the same weight (or greater).

Let’s say you want to win a race. If you do the same things that you do now in a race then you will continue to come in the same position.

People who don’t get this basic rule tend to talk a lot about luck. They will say that they will win or be more successful if they can get lucky. They look at others and comment on how lucky those people are to be successful. Luck has nothing to do with it - they are doing something different.

So when you know what you want to do make sure you have a plan to do it and if that plan does not work then change it. If your new plan is less successful you can always return to the first or try another way again. But if you always do the same thing you will always get the same result.

However not everyone appreciates this amount of freedom (where do you start with prayer if there is no guidance?) and they have looked to others who pray for some tips on how to do it. This has resulted in various structures and liturgies that have become available to Christians to help them pray and meditate. Such structures only exist as an aid and are not meant to be the only way to do it.

Today I want to talk about meditation in particular. Now meditation is for many Christians a bad word, they see it as something associated with other religions that should have no part in the Christian religion. I disagree with this. When I read the Bible I find references to meditation time and again. We might just as well rule out any expression of faith that predates Christ or is found in another faith. What about music? Or what about art? Or what about preaching? Or even what about scriptures? These all predate Christianity so does this give us a reason to reject them?

Now of course Jesus did give us guidance on prayer; for instance he told us that there is no point in keep repeating the same thing over and over in the hopes that somehow this will make the prayer more effective; he also said we should prayer with the right attitude. However, he made a particular point of not laying down a structure for our prayers - this was to give us freedom, not to stop us from expressing ourselves.

For Christians meditation has traditionally taken two forms. The first form is where a phrase is repeated over and over again - this is particularly so in the Eastern Christian religion (look up the Jesus prayer on Google for more information). The other form is to slowly read a passage of scripture to help get the meaning out of the words.

The repetition of a phrase (e.g. Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me or similar - often a line from the Psalms works well or why not try a worship song or hymn) helps to cleans the mind and soul. As the phrase is repeated it enables your focus to move from the world to God. The repetition is not to make the prayer more effective it is simply a way of getting your thoughts under control to enable God to speak. This can also be done just by opening your mind to God and stopping yourself thinking about other things. It takes a fair bit of practice and requires you to commit to doing it but after a while it can help you get closer to God. If you do want to try this then you will find that your mind still finds loads of things to think about - let it do that thinking at first - just let the thoughts come and then gently put your mind back to opening yourself up to God.

The reading of a passage from the Bible is a different kind of meditation and involves asking God to open that passage up to you and then as you read listening for God to speak.

Which ever form you take though be very careful because its easy to let your own thoughts sound like they are Gods. Anything that comes to mind you need to test against the rest of the Bible. God is always consistent with what he has said in the past so don’t ever assume that God is allowing you to do something because you heard him say it in your meditations when you know God prohibits it in other places in the Bible. For instance if you felt God was telling you to get revenge on an enemy because of what you read in the Bible or because it felt right when you meditated then you would be mistaken (try reading Matthew 5).

So Christian prayer and meditation is about freedom. Like any freedom it needs to be exercised wisely. There are ways of thinking and doing that God does not like and we would be wise to be aware of them. However apart from getting our thinking right there are no structures to limit us. Find your own ways to pray and your soul will be grateful.

Why not leave a comment telling others how you prayer?

The benefits of countryside walking have been known for a long time. Just today I heard about a report that said people with dogs tend to be fitter and less stressed than those without them. Having a dog forces you to get the exercise that helps make you fitter and lower stress.

But you don’t need a dog to get exercise.

I don’t have a dog and doubt that I ever will. I have nothing against dogs (although I was bitten by a couple of dogs when I was a child) and I’m happy for most people who keep them. But you don’t need a dog to get some exercise.

Because I was out of the habit of exercising and my life at the moment often means I spend most of my time sitting down I needed to get some more regular exercise. This coupled with my own campaign to get my children exercising more led me to set some goals.

I set the simple goal of running every morning and having a longer run (or walk) over the weekend. I only run for about 20 minutes a day (I intend to increase this). The length of the run and how long it takes are secondary to getting into the habit of running.

One of the things I often find frustrating is that most exercise programmes are worked out by those who like to exercise and are fit. If you have never been over weight you have no idea of how hard it can be to exercise. When you are unfit any exercise can make you feel really sick and horrible. I’ve been there myself - a few years back I started running in the mornings and I could only run a couple hundred meters before I was gasping for breath and had to stop. I know others won’t manage this far.

So my first tip is just to build a routine. The more you can make exercise, any exercise, a normal part of your day the more likely you are to increase it and get fit. Build the habit.

Anyway I’ve been running regularly now for a few months and it is starting to have a positive effect on my life. I really do feel better in myself, I have more energy and some of the pain of exercising has gone. My legs are now strong enough that they don’t feel like jelly when I run.

But this weekend I got a real boost.

You see I have always loved hiking. Walking in a wilderness area is wonderful to me. I like the views. I enjoy the clean air. I love the smell of warm heather. I even liked getting rained on.

When I was young I did it a lot. Then I had a long break of several years (looking back this was stupid) and over the last few years I’ve been getting back into it. The problem was that I was not very fit and as I can’t get out hiking very often I had to be content with struggling up the hills. The last month or so I got fed up with this and found lots of excuses for not going walking.

However this weekend I went for a walk. It was a moderate walk for me (about 15 miles) but I’ve struggled over this distance even then. I didn’t expect a lot but it seems my exercise has helped a lot. I was walking with my 12 year old son who has also been exercising with me.

Normally on one of these walks we would take lots of breaks up the hills and often we were so slow that we would run out of time and have to cut the walk short.

This weekend was very different. The first thing we had to do was climb a hill (it was Dartmoor after all) and we did ok. I put this down to still being fit enough as it was the first hill we had to climb. Then we went up the next hill and we found ourselves ahead of our time. Then another hill. Then the longest, steepest climb came up and I suspected by now we would need to go slow and stop a lot. We didn’t. We both steamed up the hill with a minimum of breathlessness.

This might not seem much to you but for me who used to steam up hills all the time (I was famous for it amongst my friends) this was a miracle.

I encourage you to make your own miracles. Get yourself an exercise habit. Don’t give up because winter is coming but instead set yourself some positive goals. You will be amazed at what you can achieve in even a short space of time.

Table of contents for Expanding your mind

1. A loss becomes a gain
2. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten
3. The imagination is more powerful than the will

I once read somewhere that we should never tell someone that they have failed at it. I don’t agree. It seems to me we need to wake up to the fact that sometimes we fail. But failing is not the problem, the problem is how we view that failure.

If you listen to Simon Cowell on the X-factor you will often hear him saying things that sound at face value to be nasty. He will point out what is wrong with a performance when others seem incapable of saying anything negative. Now I’m in favour of being positive but if someone is doing something wrong then they need to hear about what they are doing wrong.

When you understand this simple truth you can start turning a loss into a gain.

What to do when you fail

You must first understand that failing is not disaster. You need to train yourself not to feel the emotional failure that so often comes with the frustration of not winning. This is one of the reasons why I think competitive sport is important for children because they need to learn how to handle disappointment. You need to develop the attitude of a good loser. The way to start doing this is to be the first to genuinely congratulate the winner. So get rid of the emotion that you feel at losing. You can do this even in business and even when you can’t make contact with the winner. Just say it in your mind or even write it down somewhere but make sure you do it.

Next you need to see the loss as an opportunity. Every time you lose you learn how not to do something (someone famous said this didn’t they - was it Edison? I can’t remember). So you are learning some important lessons about yourself and the way things are done. It will not always be your fault or something that you can control. For instance in a business deal you might discover that the contract you hoped for was awarded to a family member. You were in an impossible to win situation here. However perhaps you could learn to spot the warning signs of impossible situations to win.

So you have an opportunity to learn. What did you learn? If you are stuck then find someone whose opinion you can trust and ask them. In a business deal you could even ask the person who didn’t give you the contract why you didn’t get it.

Every loss can become a gain

Do all you can to turn a loss to a gain - a failure to a success. Use the experience to motivate you on to better things. Do something different to make a difference. Change your mind or the way you do things so that next time you do not lose.

Perhaps the most important thing is to learn not to fear failure. This can be one of the worst fears there is. Don’t fear failure but instead learn to turn it into success.

Edison - one of the most successful people America has ever had once said (about his attempts to make a light bulb):

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Henry Ford went bankrupt twice before he got it right with the Ford Motor Company.

Abraham Lincoln suffered many failures before he was successful.

If you want a list of business people who went bankrupt before success take a look at

http://www.seattle-washington-bankruptcy-lawyer.com/6.html

Loss can always become gain.

The bad news is that these beliefs can stop us succeeding but the good news is that we don’t have to settle for thinking this way. There is a way to start to think differently and here it is …

We need to first of all acknowledge the problem and that all of our life we have restricted ourselves through the way we perceive ourselves.

Successful people - those who win - don’t let themselves think small thoughts about themselves. They don’t believe the limitations that are placed on them by the world. For instance if the world says you have to be tall to be a basketball player they will ignore it and become a great basketball player anyway. Or if someone says you have to be short to be a good sprinter then they ignore this and do it anyway.

It’s not that they just ignore the limitations but they find creative ways of getting around them or perhaps even using them to their advantage.

This is not an excuse for arrogance and ignoring reality. If you are trying to do something that requires a certain amount of talent or a certain look then there is a fair chance you will fail. If you ever watch the X-factor on T.V. (or American Idol etc) then you will know a fair number of people turn up at the auditions believing they are great when in fact they are terrible. You have to know yourself and you limitations but not allow the way you think to be one of those limitations.

Many of those who fail at the x-factor could do something about the way they are but they fail to see the problems and so can’t. For instance most people can learn how to sing. Most people can change the way they look. Most people can even change their personality if they really want to. But if you don’t see the problems you can’t make the change.

So don’t ignore limitations but don’t let the way you think be one of those limitations.

You need to expand the way you think. Here are 12 ways you can think differently that will expand your mind:

1. A loss becomes a gain.

2. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

3. The imagination is more powerful that the will.

4. Life works perfectly; the mind gets in the way.

5. Limitations are temporary.

6. Anyone can perform any task better.

7. Events have no meaning except what you give them.

8. Getting better is more important than winning.

9. Practice the way you want to perform.

10. The more you expect from a situation, the more you will achieve.

11. There is no such thing as luck.

12. I am my greatest fan.

I will be expanding on these over the weeks ahead. Please check back to see how we get along.

Can you add to the 12? Leave a comment telling and help the rest of us expand our minds.

Here is my suggested three stages to getting a healthier life…

Stage 1. Motivation

Unless we are motivated to do something we will not succeed in doing it. So the first step has to be to get motivated. The earliest stages in motivation are what is often called pre-contemplation. This is when you tend to get very defensive about your situation but you are aware that there is a problem. Perhaps people keep telling you there is a problem or you notice that your waist keeps expanding.

What do you do if you are in this stage?

You need to start getting educated about your situation. You can do this in secret if you want to - you don’t have to admit to anyone else that you have a problem. Perhaps you might try measuring yourself or weighing yourself (I don’t recommend doing this too often though - most of us know when we are too big or too heavy and we don’t need to be reminded by a machine!). You could try reading up on the dangers of being overweight to get you started. Here are a few sites you could use (from a quick search on Google):

http://www.mamashealth.com/eat/oweightdam.asp

http://uk.askmen.com/sports/health_150/160_mens_health.html

and in the interests of a good balanced diet of information here is an article that tells us the situation might not be as extreme as many feared but that obesity is still the major killer it has always been thought to be

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/19/health/main689523.shtml

Now the truth is that if you are getting bigger you are heading in the wrong direction.  If you keep getting bigger unchecked then you will become obese and if you become obese your weight will probably kill you. Now we all have to die from something but personally I would rather it was something outside of my control.

Then think through what life will be like if you are very fat. How will you tie up your shoe laces? How will you feel in the summer when you have to take the family to the beach.

I’m not saying that fat people should be ashamed and our obsession with skinny is just plain wrong (being very skinny is as unhealthy as being obese) but some things start to get hard when you are fat.

Then think about how your family and friends will feel when you die (especially when you die young). You could die tomorrow of course from something else but do you really want to kill yourself?

During this phase you need to get as much information as you can about what is bad about being unhealthy. Don’t just think about being overweight (if I had time I’d talk about lots of other stuff).

Now you should also start to think about all the stuff you could do if you were healthy. When you watch T.V. and see a fit and healthy person doing something great (I like watching Athletics and football - soccer to those from U.S.A.). Ignore any age issues  - most of us don’t want to compete at professional sports level - but think about how great it would be to be fit like them.

Wouldn’t you love to be able to run down the road if you needed to without getting out of breath? Wouldn’t you love to be able to go dancing and move like a dancer does? Wouldn’t you enjoy being able to play a game with your children and have them trying to keep up with you?

I’m sure you can think up a few more of these reasons to be fit.

Now you move on to the contemplation and planning stage

Stage 2. Contemplation and planning

Start thinking about what you are going to do. Don’t think about all the stuff you can’t do - this just wastes time and makes you depressed. My advice is to ignore it. If you can’t afford a gym membership or you don’t have the time to go to the gym then don’t moan about it just forget about it.

I reckon there is one thing that everyone can afford and find time for - walking. If your neighbourhood isn’t a good place to walk in then take the bus to somewhere that is. If you have children to look after then take them with you. Make it a family trip every day to somewhere you can walk. Walking has so many benefits, everyone should be doing it.

Then write down what you are going to do. Write it down (or perhaps use the bythemethod.com system to help with this). Set yourself a goal for just one week.

Now do it.

What do you do if things go wrong?

I can make you a cast iron guarantee at this point. Somewhere in your plan something will go wrong. It is the way of life that something every now and then goes wrong for us. Some of these things can be big some will be small but something somewhere is going to go wrong.

No this is not pessimism.

When something goes wrong you need to understand that it is not a disaster or even a problem. When things go wrong it is an opportunity. Here you can learn something about yourself and something about the world you live in. That learning will help you understand how to stop that same wrong thing from happening again.

Don’t ever be afraid of making mistakes and having things go wrong. I meet a lot of people who think they should be optimistic all the time and that they think this means you have to believe nothing is going to go wrong. This is just rubbish. Things do go wrong from time to time but we learn from them and move on. An optimist is someone who knows things will go wrong but believes good will come out of that wrong.

Stage 3. Keep going and evaluate

You now need to make your change stick. This means you need to keep going and build those changes into your life. When once you set yourself a goal of going walking every day you now need to make that going walking a normal part of your life.

I’m running out of time here but the best way of doing this is to keep setting goals until you feel that the goal is not necessary.

Whenever you come to the end of a goal you need to evaluate it. How did it go? Was it too easy or too difficult? What can you change to make it work?

Conclusion

Being healthy is not about going on the latest fad diet. Being healthy is a way of thinking. You need to make looking after your body part of your life. You do this by getting motivated, making plans and doing them, and then by making those changes a part of your every day life.

You need to start from where you are and make one change at a time. Do it now.

The poem follows …

[IF]

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

–Rudyard Kipling

Some scientists want us to believe that the only thing that is real is the physical world. If you can’t poke it with a stick then it doesn’t exist. Of course they go further than wanting to poke things with a stick but this is the essence of the argument. Then others seem to think that the physical is just an illusion. Who is right?

Well - of course what I am going to say is just my opinion but I think it is worth exploring the question.

If you can replicate a spiritual feeling in some other way does it mean that we have proved there is no such thing as the spiritual?

This is one of those problems that many scientists hang ona nd which seems to spook a lot of people who are undecided. The simple truth is that this does not prove anything other than that the spiritual things of life have an impact on the physical. Anyone who has ever studied a major religion will know that this is a basic truth taught be nearly every religion going. Being able to make you feel spiritual by poking part of your brain with a stick (sorry I had to get the stick in again) proves nothing.

You might well say that when someone watches a film and they fall in love with the main character this proves that love is not real because watching the film brought out the same feelings as love (of course love is much more than a feeling anyway but hopefully you are getting my point). Or to put it another way: if you read a war book and you get feelings of revulsion reading about a dead body this means that there are no dead bodies in real wars because we can simulate the feelings in other ways. Nonsense.

As my old logic professor used to say: “nonsence is nonsence whichever way you look at it”.

Is there something other than the physical world?

No one can prove there is and no one can prove there is not. So ultimately this will boil down to making a choice. You can choose to believe or not believe - sometimes called faith.

Sometimes people will try and refuse to make the choice, but the way they live and think betrays the choice they have made (but are too afraid to own up to).

I’m told that the vast majority of people in the world do have some kind of belief in another spiritual world. Some Atheists try to make out that all these people are just ignorant morons but this is simply not true. Many of the people who have a faith are very intelligent and have considered all the arguments in detail.

But at the end of the day this can only be a choice - to believe or not.

What evidence?

Well if you want empiric scientific evidence then I’m afraid you will be disappointed. This is just because science is all about discovering the physical world and so no scientific experiment is going to discover a spirit (unless it turns out the spirit is something physical of course).

But if we want the kind of evidence that is delivered in a court of law there is plenty. There is endless amounts of personal testimony. If one person says something you might doubt them or think they are mad but if thousands says something is true then you have to start taking notice. If lots of very sensible people who you trust says something is true then the balance of believing starts to become overwhelming.

Now I don’t know who you trust and just because nearly everyone says it is true doesn’t actually mean it is. But as I said before this is ultimately a matter of choice - your choice.

For me it is all about Jesus

Some people say that your faith is just a matter of where you are born and in some cases this is no doubt true. However I am one of those people who made a choice for myself. It is true I had Christian parents but they never spoke to me about their own faith. I was also at the time not going to a church. I did believe in spiritual things - because I had made my choice - and I wanted to find out more.

I looked at the great religions and I considered taking the spirituality without beliefs route but ultimately they were all very unhelpful to me. It was reading through and thinking about the teachings of Jesus that I started to believe that Jesus was the only one with any real truth to what he was saying. More normal than any others and yet with a simple truth of faith and a God wanting to forgive swayed me in his direction.

An awful lot of rubbish talked about Jesus

Ever since it’s earliest days people have been talking a lot of rubbish about Jesus. The church has been as guilty as anyone for doing this but thankfully every now and then a revolution happens in the church and they discover the real Jesus again. It happened when the early church got together to make the creeds and put the new testament together. Thank goodness they got rid of a lot of rubbish back then. It was not a cover up and it was not down to the whims of one powerful man it was the church purging itself of those ideas that were not from Jesus. This happens again and again in the life of the church. No religion or science has ever been as critical of its own believes as the church has throughout its life. I’ve been at the leadership end and I know first hand just how serious the church takes being true to the teachings of Jesus.

Now no doubt like me you have watched all the latest “top” scholars (they aren’t by the way) telling us how the discovery of some new forgotten gospel proves the church wrong. These are just wayward people who wouldn’t be heard unless they made a controversial statement, and so keep telling T.V. producers (who then see the chance of a bit of fame and fortune) about their amazng new discovery, who then make T.V. programs claiming to prove the truth. They don’t. No T.V. producer is much interested in the real truth because it doesn’t make money for them. You may like to know that the church has known about these so called hidden gospels for a very long time and they have been studied in detail but found wanting.

Sorry I’m starting to rant a little.

There is an awful lot of rubbish talked about Jesus but I have come to love him and what he says gives me hope.

Is there a spirit?

Yes - I believe the weight of evidence is overwhelming.

Can we poke the spirit with a stick?

No - it is not physical.

How do we find out about spiritual things?

Listen to people who are spiritual but also look for what makes sense to you.

Personally

For me the greatest spiritual teacher (and also my friend by the way) is Jesus. I would recommend him to anyone.

But you must make your own mind up.