The 5th & 6th of the 7-Disciplines 5. THE DISCIPLINE OF PERSONAL RENEWAL ~ It is not stress that diminishes your effectiveness and leaves you feeling utterly exhausted at the end of the day, but our failure to gain some relief from the inevitable stresses we face. Every week, a period of time should be designated for some serious personal renewal/emotional detox - “failing to devote time to the discipline of self-renewal is like saying you are so busy driving that you don’t have time to stop for fuel.” This could entail a walk in natural surroundings - discovering the power of solitude, scheduling a massage or some other type of body-work. Allowing yourself a period of quiet contemplation will enrich your observations and allow you to begin to understand not just what is happening around you, but why it is happening. Don’t be so busy striving to make a living that you forget how to live a life or “stop struggling to make a living, and start making a life for yourself.” 6. THE DISCIPLINE OF MASTERY OF YOUR MIND ~ Too many of us are consumed by needless and endless worry. This drains us of our natural vitality and energy on a daily basis. The average person has sixty thousand thoughts per day and ninety-five percent of those thoughts are the same as the ones of the day before. This is a result of bad mental habits: rather than focusing on all the good in their lives and thinking of ways to make things even better, we are captives of the past. The way we think stems from habit, pure and simple. Mental mastery comes through conditioning, nothing more and nothing less. There is only one thing that we have absolute dominion over, and that is our minds. While we cannot control the events that take place around us, we can most certainly control our attitude towards these events. We all have the power to determine what we will think about during any given moment. All success in life, whether material or spiritual, starts with the thoughts that you put into your mind every second of every minute of every day. Your outer world reflects the state of your inner world. By controlling the thoughts that you think and the way you respond to the events of your life, you begin to control your destiny. There are no mistakes in life, only lessons. There is no such thing as a negative experience, only opportunities to grow, learn and advance along the road of self-mastery. Rather than judging events as either positive or negative simply experience them, celebrate them and learn from them. Every event offers you growth. These little lessons fuel your inner and outer growth. Without them, you would be stuck on a plateau. Most people have grown the most from their most challenging experiences. Should you meet with an outcome you did not expect and feel a little disappointed, remember that the laws of nature always ensure that when one door closes another opens. Once you consistently apply this principle to your daily life and start to condition your mind to translate every event into a positive, empowering one, you will banish worry forever. You will stop being a prisoner of your past. Instead you will become the architect of your future. The mind is a wonderful servant, but terrible master — the price of greatness is responsibility over each of your thoughts. Enlightened thinkers know that their thoughts from their world and the quality of one’s life come down to the richness of one’s thoughts. If you want to live a more peaceful, meaningful life, you must think more peaceful, meaningful thoughts. The moment you concentrate the focus of your mind on a singular purpose, extraordinary gifts will appear within your life. The secret of happiness is simple: find out what you truly love to do and then direct all of you energy doing it. If you study the happiest, healthiest, most satisfied people of our world, you will see that each and every one of them has found their passion in life, and then spent their days pursuing it. Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued. It must ensue. It only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself. “Opposition thinking” is a straightforward process of when an undesirable thought occupies the focal point of your mind, immediately replace it with an uplifting one. If you want to live life to the fullest, care for your thoughts as you would your most prized possessions — you truly cannot afford the luxury of even one negative thought, it starts small but grows and takes on a life of its own. Also never get into the petty habit of measuring your self-worth against other people’s net-worth. Every second you spend thinking about someone else’s dreams, you take time away from your own. There is nothing noble about being superior to some other person. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self”.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 11:17:15 +0000
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