Living Now and Dealing with Thought Poop

Wayne Dyer in his book, Your Erroneous Zones, said that Jesus was a totally self-actualized person, a person who has no guilt and no negative internal self-talk weighing Him down--none of that stuff that hampers most of us. Lance Wallnau talks about being in the present moment by focusing your energy on the person in front of you and thinking of that person as a human being created in the image of God, gifted with specific, unique and wonderful talents. Today I discovered Josh Pais and his method for being in the now. He also brings up self talk and points out that most of it is repetitive and total, pure drivel that our minds engage in day after day after day--a lot of it is negative self-talk and plain old worry.

You guys know me well enough to begin nodding your heads and saying, "Yep, there's Mom. Lots of negative self-talk and worrying about stupid stuff." Yes, I admit it. This has come up because I'm on a campaign to stop being socially incompetent. You may recall I gave a book talk back in November 2014. I wasn't scared of that public speaking moment at all, even though three of the people in the audience sent definite, "Wow, that's stupid," vibes in my general direction. (They didn't stick around to buy my book, but they sure did eat a lot of cookies!) Anyway, they didn't phase me. I guess teaching Sunday School all those years and leading Cub Scouts did give me some experience in public speaking. What scared me was chatting with people I didn't already know. Why that absolutely terrifies me, I don't understand, but it does. (Why do I care what they think of me? I don't know.)

Back to Pais. Apparently being in the present moment is the key. Jesus is the Master of that skill--duh--He's the Master of all the skills--but that's how He can be with the bossy, fire-breathing Pharisees and not be phased by them and then hang out with prostitutes who came to adore Him. He's present--He's WITH them. His mind isn't wandering off thinking of how He's going to reply or what He wants for supper or wondering when the person is going to stop talking so He can walk away--He's there, totally, with the person.

I used to have this skill before I became a teenager and my mind latched onto the concept that I was good for nothing. Mr. Cabbot used to come into the nursery, sit in the back and drink coffee. If my Dad was around and had a minute, he'd join him. One day Mr. Cabbot came in fuming, but my Dad was busy. I felt like he needed someone to talk to, so I got a coke out of the machine (I knew where the key was) and joined him. He went on about his wife. I don't remember what she did, but he was furious. After a while he stopped ranting so I asked him, "If you had to do it all over again, would you still marry her?" He stared at me for a second then he got this speculative look on his face. A few moments later he looked sad, then happy, then, strangely, his face turned soft and affectionate and he said, "Thank you. I better go see my wife." He walked out and he didn't come back to the nursery for a couple of weeks. I like to think he went home and started a second honeymoon.

If I can attach the first lesson from Josh Pais to this post, I'm going to do it. Otherwise, go to his site and sign up for it. It's really good! However, I would beg to differ with him on one point: you can learn to think differently by learning to think like Jesus and the way you learn to think like Jesus is to study Him and meditate on how He did things. In short, study the Bible. The Word of God literally will renew your mind. I know, because it renewed mine.

I've come a long way doing this from the days when I would worry so much that I literally could not move. And, believe it or not, I've come a long way from the days of the most self-hating self-talk you probably never wanted to know I engaged in. That said, there is still useful information in Pais's MP3--mostly about the idea of yanking yourself back to the present moment. As I mentioned above, Lance Wallnau talks about being in the present too. I have four MP3's on that topic and related ones that I bought from his website. I've shared them with Charlie, Dano and Dan and they're really good. I can copy them to zip drives.

Stephen Pressfield, the guy who wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance, writes about a thing called "Resistance." This is the force that is determined that regardless of what you believe is the good thing to do, the creative thing you can do now, the beauty you can create, the poetry you can write--whatever it is--Resistance is there to make sure you don't do it. Resistance takes many forms such as procrastination, distraction and so on, including negative self-talk.

The primary residence of Resistance is not out there in the world, but inside our own heads. Pais describes it this way, "The mind wants to pull us out of the present into the past (to compare now with something in the past) or the future (starting with the initial optimism: "this is going great, I'm going to make it this time," and then moving on to "oh crap, I'm done, it's over now."). The mind does this because when you're living in the present, it has no control. The mind likes to have control." (Below is a video of an interview Pais did, it has most of the information from the Pais MP3 download.)

The "mind" as Pais describes it, or Resistance as Pressfield describes it, is what the Apostle Paul calls the "sinful nature," that part of us that is infected with sin, for lack of a better term. The objective of the sinful nature is to sabotage everything good we try to do and ruin everything good God has created by misusing it or abusing it in one way or another. Essentially, to keep us from amounting to anything and make sure we screw up as much as possible. And, it makes sense that Jesus had no issues with Resistance or the "mind" as Pais describes it, because He didn't have a sinful nature trying to maintain its control over Him--He didn't even have a smidgen of its infection.

A believer in Christ has had the root of the infection removed, but the tendrils of its influence remain and we must do battle with those tendrils in one way or another. The primary place where battle occurs is in our minds. Everything starts there--with what we believe. The mind likes to flood our thoughts with loads of crap because if we are distracted, out of the present moment, what we believe will have no effect because it's not being employed. God's favor is showered up on us and we might even believe it, but if our mind is focused on negative self talk--it doesn't matter what we believe, Resistance or the "mind" or the sinful nature, whatever you want to call it, is blocking the positive results we might otherwise obtain.

Unfortunately, for most Christians, Resistance is built into what they're taught--before I learned better I repeated the same crap. You can't really expect blessings from God until you behave right--that's the old saw. But it's a lie. It's not about our behavior, it's about Jesus' behavior because once we say, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in our hearts God raised Him from the dead, we are IN Him in much the same way I am in my house right now typing this. To be IN Him means that everything, including His perfection, is ours as if we owned it from day one, whether we personally measure up or not. Unfortunately, it might be ours, but if we think we can't have it until we follow the rules, we won't be able to access it. That's like sleeping on the floor when there's a perfectly good bed right there in the room because we don't believe we're allowed even though the bed has a sign on it, "It's yours. Enjoy."

Anyway, back to Pais. I can't figure out how to share an MP3, so here's the link to John Pais free lesson. And below is the YouTube video with most of the free lesson on it:


Love to you all

Malcolm Gladwell Ted Talk about David and Goliath

This is awesome and very enlightening. We make lots of assumptions about stories in the Bible based on views that have been passed down, originally from people who simply didn't know what they were talking about or had incomplete views. We all have incomplete views when it comes to the Bible, there's no way around that. God often overcomes all our misinformation, but sometimes our incorrect information is damaging to our relationships with others and with God.

Everything You Thought You Knew About Archery is Wrong...

This is so awesome, I had to share it. It reminds me of the Malcolm Gladwell TedTalk about David and Goliath--how David was a slinger and alingers used to be a critical soldier on the ancient battlefield. I'll post that video when I find it, but for now a video about how the ancient archers used to do it:

Carrying the Bride Over the Threshold

I just started a book called Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism by Larry Siedentop. (He means "liberalism" in the classic sense, not liberalism as we know it today.) He begins by explaining the ancient ideas of personal identity and family. One of the items you might be interested in is the practice of carrying the bride over the threshold into her new home.

Before the Greeks and Romans developed the pantheon we're familiar with today, they worshiped their ancestors. Worship was passed down from father to oldest son and centered around keeping the family hearth alive with hot coals. If the hearth died, the family could expect punishment from their ancestors who relied on the family hearth to keep warm and obtain food.

Children had identity based on their association with the patriarch of the family and his identity was associated with those who came before him--from male to male. Girls weren't very important. (In Rome daughters usually didn't have names, they were Daughter One and Daughter Two and so on.) Daughters who were to be married underwent a ceremony in which the father kicked them out of the family. When she arrived at her new home, her newly wed husband had to carry her into the house because she had no right to enter until she was formally inducted into the family through another ceremony--hence the practice of carrying a bride over the threshold.

Amazing how this ancient practice persists, isn't it?

Gambling Farmers

Yesterday an acquaintance posted birthday greetings to her husband, expressing her admiration for him as lover and father. Today she shared her son's blog post in which the young man honored his step-father and commented how her children see her husband as their "real" father. She explained how she divorced her first husband because he was cheating on her and then he divorced himself from his kids. Her present husband has always treated her children as his own and together they made a family as well bonded and in love with one another as any good family made the old-fashioned way. The man is a farmer.

My husband married me, a widow and divorcee with four children and treated them as his own. He's a farmer.

Farmers are a special breed of human being. No other gambler on the face of the earth cares more for life, is willing to risk everything for life (and does it every year) or works harder to support life. In the safety of our houses in the supposed safety of our cars and planes, we forget: life is a gamble from beginning to end. Farming is gambling. It's a gamble whether the weather will grant favor or ruin; it's a gamble whether crop prices will be good or bad; it's a gamble whether the expense sheet will be outweighed by the profit sheet. And sometimes it's a gamble whether a farmer will come home uninjured or even live through the day.

Farmers are natural candidates to marry women with a bunch of kids. Such a task doesn't faze them at all. They do it every day. A flock of sheep or a herd of cows will produce a passel of little ones and the farmer is their defacto father who must look after their needs and bring them through harsh winters, dog attacks and periods of drought alive and well. A field of cotton or chile is no different, it needs a father/farmer to make it thrive and produce a bountiful harvest. Children who grow up loving others and living productive lives--that's success for a parent and no better harvest can be found on planet earth.