And above all I would say ” Secrets of the Millionaire Mind is all time Kept secret so I do !”

Doesn’t the word, “should” make you focus on what your ought to be doing instead of what you’re doing? Just food for thought.

Harv has some good stuff. Nice piece to share. My current favorite is Seth Godin’s Dip: Knowing When to Quit (and Knowing When to Stick) where he explains that successful people have quit a lot of things to become successful.

The latest unexpected wisdom I got is from T. Harv Eker’s “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. He said “… successful people are bigger than their problem … and unsuccessful people are smaller than their problems.” So if we are bigger than our problems, the problems are simply inconvenience.

I love it. And most hurts are cured by a hug and ice cream. This should be one of those “unexpected wisdoms” we’re talking about.

Thanks for including your photos. I really love them.

http://www.aprilgroves.com/beautifulchaos/about-me

Thanks. Please do. And let me know so I can ‘meet’ you and your loved ones.

And I’m fine waiting on the teenage talk. I have a strange suspicion that much of how a child navigates their teenage years has to do with their early development and parenting.

What a lovely explanation…thank you.

I have read Reflections of the Art of Living – though years ago.

I remember Joseph Campbell of someone trying to explain through words and mental imagery the process that many people experience through the depth of their spiritual path. Likely, I’m over-simplifying. Yet what I find interesting about personal growth and spiritual unfoldment is the experiential process itself – which I, personally, find so difficult to explain. Sure, I have some great stories and some very interesting approaches to how the world works inside me. But I do find it difficult to explain my unfolding unveiling. Much of it seems just to individualized.

April,

We’ll see how we do with teenagers.

The best advice I ever got was from my mom. As children, we were always encouraged to speak our mind, but, we were never to be disrespectful. Momma would tell us, “You can say whatever it is you want to say, as long as you remember who you are saying it to.”

She thought she was preventing a sass back to her, and she did. But she also planted seeds of good parenting, effective marital communications, personal responsibility, business savvy, good friend qualities…the list goes on.

The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, “Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There’s a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.” And so it starts.

The call is to leave a certain social situation, move into your own loneliness and find the jewel, the center that’s impossible to find when you’re socially engaged. You are thrown off-center, it’s time to go. This is the departure when the hero feels something has been lost and goes to find it. You are to cross the threshold into new life. It’s a dangerous adventure, because you are moving out of the sphere of the knowledge of you and your community.

When one thinks of some reason for not going or has fear and remains in society because it’s safe, the results are radically different from what happens when one follows the call, If you refuse to go, then you are someone else’s servant. When this refusal of the call happens, there is a kind of drying up, a sense of life lost. Everything in you knows that a required adventure has been refused. Anxieties build up. What you have refused to experience in a positive way, you will experi­ence in a negative way.

If what you are following, however, is your own true adventure, if it is some­thing appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness, then magical guides will appear to help you. If you say, “Everybody’s going on this trip this year, and I’m going too,” then no guides will appear. Your adventure has to be coming right out of your own interior. If you are ready for it, then doors will open where there were no doors be­fore, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have cour­age. It’s the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.

When you cross the threshold, you are passing into the dark forest, taking a plunge into the sea, embarking upon the night sea journey. It involves passing through clash­ing rocks, narrow gates, or the like, which represent yes and no, the pairs of oppo­sites. There will be a moment when the walls of the world seem to open for a second, and you get an insight through. Jump then! Go! The gates will often close to so fast that they take off the tail of your horse. You may be dismem­bered, lose every­thing you have. This is Christ leaving the Mother, the world, and going to the Father, the Spirit. This is Jonah swallowed by the whale, its jaws being the pairs of oppo­sites.

What this represents psychologically is the trip from the realm of conscious, ratio­nal intentions into the zone of those energies of the body that are moving from another center: the center with which you are trying to get in touch.

As you now go towards the center, there will come more aids, as well as increas­ingly difficult trials. You have to give up more and more of what you’re hanging on to. The final thing is a total giving up, a yielding all the way. This is a place directly opposite to your life experiences, and all that you’ve been taught in school. Psycho­logical­ly, it’s a shift into the unconscious; otherwise, it’s a move into a field of action of which you know nothing. Anything can happen, and it may be favorable or unfavorable.

The deeper you go, and the closer you get to the final realization, the heavier the resistance. You are coming down to those areas that are the ones that are re­pressed, and it’s that repression system you have to pass through. And there, of course, is where magical aid is most re­quired. The hero may here discover for the first time that there is everywhere a benign power supporting him in his superhuman passage.

There is a lot more in the book…a book I highly recommend: Reflections of the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion Edited by D.K. Osbon, c. 1991, HarperColl­ins, New York.

Gabriella

I love that. Mind if I use it from time to time?

Gabriella,

I’ve loved that piece for years myself. And how true it is.

Sufis speak of the jewel hidden in the mountain of our existence. It makes me think of mining the depths of our being, ever searching to uncover the jewel. Yet in what we find, we return, richer in knowledge and experience, to the place we began.

Kate,

Thanks. You’re welcome to it. I’m pretty certain my grandfather didn’t create it.

What’s just as lovely is that I’ve found it to be true in every circumstance in my life.

ExPat Mom,

I share it with you so you can use it – if it has value to you. It reminds me that I always have choice in how I see the world – or myself in it – even if the choice is in my thoughts about it.

The way is simple, only the steps are complex.

For me it was reading “The Magus” sometime in the 60’s, which they then made a great movie of with Anthony Quinn, Michael Caine, and a very young and beautiful Candice Bergen.

In that book I became acquainted with these four lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

and they meant so much to my very young spirit.

Gabriella

In the story, the ‘hero’ travels to a mystical world and meets a giant named Saltheart Foamfollower. The hero is a pretty cynical, melancholy guy, but he never dampens the giant’s spirit — in fact, the giant often laughs when Covenant is complaining.

When he asks the giant why he laughs, the giant replies, “Joy is in the ears that hear.” That one woke me up, big time — and I’ve never forgotten it. It shaped my life really strongly, too… on many occasions, it helped me to stay buoyant in deflating circumstances.

I often get pearls from books and movies, where the message doesn’t seem to be directed towards imparting a lesson.

Thanks for the explanation. There’s still something missing for me. I’ll see if I can find it on your site (whose link I made live).

I’ll let you know what I ‘discover.’

What this is really all about is beginning to practice keeping yourself on an even emotional keel, where that “evenness” is on the higher end of a hypothetical continuum from 0-10.

How do you do that? Not so terribly hard, but it does involve become aware of yourself on all levels – body, emotions, and spirit. That is also a question of practice. Once you have achieved a modicum of practice in this awareness of self, you now need to recognize that the responsiblity for your state of mind/heart/spirit lies with you.

No matter what the external event, how you are inside of you, is your responsibility. Nelson Mandela, Victor Frankl, Alexander Solzhenitsyn can all testify to how well this can work even in the most horrific of circumstances.

So once you have some awareness of self, and some acceptance of your responsibility in how well you are feeling, you now come to choice. And you always have a choice in your reactions and actions regarding anything that has happened to you.

So that’s it in a nutshell. But reading some of the articles (newsletters) on my website (http://www.advancedpersonaltherapy.com), as I mentioned earlier, would be helpful.

Gabriella