Are You Addicted To Suffering? (And Ready To Quit?)

I teach my students and clients that one should look for the best three paragraphs when curating; occasionally I say it’s OK to double dip and grab two quotes. When it comes to Kute Blackson, I usually break all my rules – his stuff is sooo good that I usually end up curating his entire post to that it’s easier for you to read the whole think. Today is no exception to the Kute Blackson rule:

Most guru’s or teachers will teach how to avoid suffering. I am going to share with you the seven steps of how to successfully create suffering in your life, so that you can be aware of them and make different choices.

Suffering can become a very dangerous addiction. An unhealthy way to feel. An ultimately unfulfilling way to feel alive. You can get so used to suffering that it becomes comfortable and familiar. Suffering is the ego’s way of feeling important.

Whether you are a businessman or a buddha, pain is inevitable. There is no way to avoid it. Just by virtue of being in a human body there will be some pain. Trying to avoid pain will only create more suffering. Embrace pain to release yourself from suffering.

Suffering is optional. Suffering is a choice.

Suffering comes from your story about what is happening in your life and less about what is actually happening. What is happening is simply what is happening. The suffering part comes from all your interpretations and meanings about the experience. Change your story and the way you are interpreting reality and you begin to change your reality. When you change your reality within yourself, you shift your experience of your reality outside. Once you understand this, you only suffer if you chose to.

What stories are you making up about yourself, your life, your partner, your current experience that is causing you suffering?

The Seven Keys to creating suffering:

1- Resist everything: Resist what is. Resist reality. Fight against what is happening in your life with all your might. This is a guaranteed method to suffer.

Key Solution: Accept what is, so that you can then decide how to shift it.

2- Holding the belief: “The experience that is happening to me should not be happening to me. I should be having some other experience than the one I am having. This shouldn’t be happening to me”. You have probably heard yourself doing some version of this. It just keeps you stuck.

Key Solution: Embrace your current experience. Your current experience is the experience that you are meant to be having because you are having it right now. Trust, and focus on what you can learn and how you can grow. The experience is here to help you evolve.

3- Focusing on all the things that you cannot control. This will only cause you to feel completely helpless and disempowered. It will leave you in a state of worry and anxiety. Some of us are professional “worriers”. No matter how much you worry, it doesn’t actually change the situation. Once you are done worrying, the situation will be the same. Worrying is a waste of time.

Key Solution: Focus on what you can control. Take actions that are in your power, step by step.

4- Refusing to change. Keep doing the same over and over and hoping for a different result. Well, as Einstein said, this is the definition of insanity. Are you so set in your ways that you are afraid of giving up the known suffering for the unknown possibility of happiness?

Key Solution: Embrace change. Be willing to do something different. Let go. Go into the unknown. Take different actions.

5- Give up your responsibility: Be a victim. Play the blame game, making everyone else at fault or responsible for your life and how you feel. Unless you take responsibility for your current experience, then you are powerless to change it.

Key Solution: Take full responsibility for your current reality and decide what changes you are committed to making. Give up blame.

6- Focus on everything that is wrong in your life. Whether a relationship or person. When you focus on what is wrong, you will surely find what is wrong. You will end up creating more of what is wrong to feel wrong about. Then the negative cycle continues.

Key Solution: Start focusing on what you are grateful for. Remember all your blessings, and appreciate that daily. What you appreciates, expands. What you thank about comes about.

7- Denial: Lie to yourself and others. Pretend that everything is fine when you know that it isn’t. When you avoid facing what is, you end up staying stuck and repeating the same patterns of pain and relationship. This only ends up prolonging your suffering.

Key Solution: Tell the truth to yourself first. Tell the truth to those in your life. Be honest. Face reality.

Life is too short to waste spent suffering. Most of what you worry about today, you won’t even remember a few months from now. Most of what you are trying to change in people today, you won’t care about on your deathbed.

You hold the padlock and you hold the key to your freedom.

Source: Are You Addicted To Suffering? (And Ready To Quit?)

The Key To Healing It Is Feeling It; Embrace All Your Feelings As A Gift!

The challenge with curation is often finding the best 3 paragraphs to share. Kute Blackson’s post is so good today that I just grabbed the whole think. Sorry, Kute – hope you don’t mind…

All of your feelings are a gift.

Yet we often judge feelings as good or bad. We often try to eliminate the bad ones and feel only the good ones. However, in doing so, you end up disconnecting from the full range of your heart, self-expression and power.

To the degree that you suppress what you might think of as the negative feelings is to the degree that you also disconnect from your capacity to fully experience the positive feelings.

Ultimately, there are no good or bad feelings. Feelings are just energy moving through your body. Every feeling is a signal, which if you pay attention to will point you in the direction of something that you actually need to deal with, a part of you that needs loving compassion or needs to be released. Even the feelings you label as bad are simply a signal. They are like a fire alarm trying to get you to pay attention to a part of yourself. If you don’t listen, the signal gets louder and louder until you do. If you keep suppressing, the feelings end up coming out anyway most likely in a not so gracious way (AKA -You lose it, or have a meltdown and explode)!

When you suppress your authentic feelings, those feelings simply remain incomplete buried deep within you. You often end up recreating situations and relationships in your life based on those old incomplete feelings, as there is a deep impulse within us to complete what is incomplete.

What you might call “bad” feelings show you the parts of yourself that need your love and healing. Healing is applying love to the parts of yourself that are hurting. When you hold a space of compassion for yourself and the full range of your feelings without any judgment, this compassion has a transformative effect.

As children we learn to disconnect from our authentic feelings. We disconnect as a way to avoid pain, hurt, rejection, shame etc.  And it becomes a survival mechanism in order to function and protect ourselves.  That way of being may have “worked” for us as children to survive, but take this way of being into our adulthood and end up recreating those same incomplete childhood patterns over and over, it only creates suffering.

What feelings are you suppressing?

What feelings are you disconnecting from?

What feelings are you afraid of feeling and acknowledging within your self?

Take an honest look.

The feelings that you suppress, or are unwilling to acknowledge and embrace, will run you!

The feelings that you are unable to have will end up having you.

When you suppress your real feelings, whether anger, sadness or hurt – over time, you might end up finding yourself feeling depressed, heavy, irritated and lacking aliveness. The heaviness is a sign that you are suppressing and ends up clouding your ability to now feel joy in the present moment.

No feelings last forever. But we are sometimes afraid to feel the feelings we think are bad because we are worried we will stay stuck there. Know this: all feelings pass. None are permanent. To the degree you can feel them, you will let them go and feel more alive.

So do not resist the negative feelings, feel them fully with total awareness whilst connecting to the sensations in your body. They will move through you and dissolve.

Similarly, no positive feelings will last forever either. So when you feel a positive feeling, simply feel it fully with total awareness, without trying to make it stay, and you might find yourself experiencing it longer. What often happens is in an effort to keep the “good” feelings we try to make it stay, which creates a contraction. In doing so we start to lose the positive feeling even more quickly!

When you are willing to embrace and love the dark in you, you are then able to more fully embrace your light. However, let me be clear, it is NOT about wallowing in your negativity and dark feelings using that as an excuse. Feeling authentically isn’t wallowing or indulging. It is simply about acknowledging and integrating what your feelings have to share with you and allowing them to move through you in a healthy way.

Ultimately you are not your feelings, whether good or bad. You are beyond them all. Your relationship with your feelings is as important as the feelings themselves. No need to be afraid or run away from them.

Your feelings are a portal into a deeper dimension of yourself and thus a deeper dimension of your own Divinity and freedom.

Your feelings are a gift. Sometimes you just need to patiently unwrap them, so you can find the important message inside.

When you feel it, you heal it.

And when you heal it, you can be more of the real you that you are meant to be.

It is time.

Love. Now.

Source: The Key To Healing It Is Feeling It…Embrace All Your Feelings As A Gift!

Who And What Are You Attracting?

I love Kute Blackson’s energy and insights. Today’s is no exception:

You attract to you in life who you are.

The experiences and people of your life are an incredible mirror showing you where you are today in your consciousness.

So you are constantly in relationship with yourself. The real relationship is with aspects of yourself that you attract to you in the physical, in the form of the partner and experiences that are in front of you at any given moment.

Take a moment to look at who and what you are attracting.

Do you like what you see? Are there any repetitive patterns?

To the degree you are willing to be responsible for your current reality and the people you attract is the degree to which you will be free and have the power to change your reality.

You are not a victim…

Regardless of what might have happened in your past or what someone might have done to you.

You have a choice in this moment to choose what your experience of yourself and life will be today. You have a choice as to how you will respond and live your present and future.

Playing victim doesn’t serve you in any way. It just keeps you small and powerless. Who you are is so much more.

Sometimes we hold onto being a victim out of feeling right that we were wronged. Staying stuck in victimhood is simply giving away your power to the person that you have perceived hurt you.

Is it really worth it?

Nothing is worth your freedom.

Nothing.

Life is too short and precious. Every second wasted is a moment you will never get back.

Trust that if any wrong is done to you, it is not your job to “right” it. The Uni-verse will rebalance all actions. You cannot cheat the Uni-verse. When you retaliate with anger, resentment or vindictiveness, you simply end up hurting yourself. And it certainly won’t bring you real joy.

It takes real courage to forgive and let go. It takes real courage to take responsibility for your inner experience, especially when someone has wronged or hurt you.

So how much freedom do you want to experience?

You choose.

Relationship is a great mirror in life.

Many of us want a relationship out there, with a special person, but we’re not even in relationship with ourselves. We want someone out there to give us something, to love us in a certain way, to accept us unconditionally, but we’re not giving that to ourselves.

It has to start with YOU. This is the foundation. This is the key.

In order to attract the right person and relationship into your life you must be the right person with yourself. That’s what you can control. You can’t control others behaviors out there, but you can control taking an honest look at yourself and seeing what the blocks, wounds, insecurities, resentments and fears are inside of you, and releasing them. The more you release, the more in alignment you become with your authentic self, and as a result the more life will reflect this back to you.

As you heal and transform what no longer serves you, you access your innate wholeness. From there, not only will you be able to feel differently within yourself, you will be attracted and attracting differently based on who you have become. No longer seeking to get love from the outside, but living in touch with the love that you are inside.

This is the power you have.

So remember this:

1- Take responsibility for your inner and outer experiences.
2- Learn your lessons from life.
3- Forgive yourself and the others involved.
4- Let go and trust the Uni-verse.
5- Envision your inspired future letting that pull you forward.

You are born to be the best you can be and evolve into the highest expression that your soul is seeking to become in this lifetime.

Focus on what is real, important and brings you more joy.

You are Infinite.

Love. Now.” Source: Who And What Are You Attracting?

The Most Powerful Time Management Tool You Will Ever Need!

I always get excited when I see that Kute Blackson has posted again. Today is no exception…

The most powerful time management tool you will ever need:

Life is short.

Each moment is precious.

When it’s gone its gone.

You can make your money back, You can buy material possessions.

But not  your time.

How do you want to live each moment?

This really hit me many years ago as I sat in the back of an Indian taxi speeding down a country road in the Andhra Pradesh wilderness, at close to 115 mph. As I dozed off waiting to arrive at my destination, I looked up only to see a huge truck the size of a whale heading straight into our taxi.

This was not good.

In a matter of seconds everything turned slow motion, and I had one of those moments you hear so much about. My entire life flashed in front of me, including the images of those I loved,  and the regrets I had sat in my heart like a heavy weight.

I was sure I was going to die.  My destiny seemed certain.

I had often wondered how I would face death when that moment actually came. My moment had come. I closed my eyes, and strangely felt a deep calmness realizing there was nothing more I could do in that moment. I had lived a good life.

I prepared myself to meet my maker.

Then all of a sudden I felt the car spin around full circle and come to a screeching halt. Boom. I opened my eyes, and in a dazed state I was quite surprised to still be alive.

My life was never the same after that. It was like going through a death and the surrender that comes with it, only to find myself still alive.

We are all going to die.  You, me, Gandhi, Sai Baba, Mother Teresa, Hitler, Michael Jackson, Bruce Lee, your loved ones. All of us.

This is the bottom line. No one makes it out of this life alive.

The real question becomes “How are you going to live each moment of your life so that when that moment comes you will be ready with no regrets?”

Yet we often waste time on things that aren’t that important.

When you embrace death you embrace life. You embrace each moment as a precious opportunity to live fully and share your gifts with the world.

When you realize and fully accept that you will die. Then you no longer waste time on trivial matters. For each second wasted is a piece of life that if forever gone. Each second becomes more precious that gold. It frees you up to get on with living your life in a way that you have no regrets.

When that moment comes in your life, much of what you stressed about, worried about, fretted about, screamed about, argued about, gossiped about, cried about, fought about, controlled about won’t really matter.

When that moment comes what will matter will be “Did you love those in your life as fully as possible? Did you give your gifts as deeply as possible? Did you become the most authentic expression of who you were meant to be in this life?”

If you find yourself wasting time, being unproductive, or unsure how to allocate your time, ask your self. “Is this how I would like to die?”

And if not, then rearrange your time, your activities, your relationships, your state of mind and emotions in such a way that you can say “Yes” no matter when that moment arrives.

The time is truly now.

Source: The Most Powerful Time Management Tool You Will Ever Need! | The Official Blog of Kute Blackson

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