Monday, November 21, 2016

How's Your State of Mind?


 We all smile in the same language

”If people are going nuts around you there is still a still place inside you.

”However, don’t get to blissed out or someone will come and take your furniture.” –Tony Robbins


I have heard that 80% of our population is depressed.”

And what do we do for a depressed person?

Drug them.

Are they still depressed?

Most. Yes.

Stop using the word depressed. Say pissed off, frustrated, angry, etc. 

What is your flavor of suffering?

Humm…

There are two basic fears that all humans share:

1.    That they aren’t good enough.
2.    That they are not loved.

The idea of a workshop, seminar, whatever you want to call it, is to Play full out. If the presenter is the one doing all the work, he gets all the muscle.

The state in which you learn something is the state in which you will apply it. If you listen passively you will get maybe 10% retention. Notes are 50-55% retention, Listen and take notes 90%.

I don’t know how you take notes without listening, maybe borrow them like in college. Maybe just write and not listen. Oh well.  Here, with no sound or visuals you are stuck with reading.

You remember sitting at a lackluster lecture, fighting sleep, the chair gets hard, your legs go to sleep, your butt turns numb.

And you were paying for it!

Tony Robbins is like the Energizer Bunny on speed. He can go fifteen hours straight, dancing, jumping up and down, yelling at the top of his lungs, and pushing his voice over its limit. (He has damaged it, and takes a day on, a day off.)

When I heard Tony wasn’t going to speak the second day, I thought, Hey, I thought we got Tony for 3 and 1/2 days.

However, Joseph McClendon III won me over. I love him.


His story is that he was homeless for a time sleeping in a box in Lancaster California. You can drive for miles around Lancaster and only see sand and telephone poles—that story comes later.

The reason he was sleeping in a box was that someone tried to kill him because of the color of his skin. He thought, “If someone would do that to me. There must be something wrong with me.”

One day a man gave him a book.

It was Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

He read it and went back to the man who had given it to him with the understanding that when someone gives you a gift you ought to give them something in return.

The man said to pass it on, not the book specifically, but the principles and now McClendon is a neuro-psychologist in L.A. and a presenter at the Tony Robbins event. He says it isn’t the motivation, it’s the “Do.”

While McClendon was urging us to believe we rocked, he suggested that when we approach an automatic door where two doors part like a theater curtain, that we swing wide our arms as though we caused it, stand in the open doorway, blow kisses and bow.

He had been doing that. One day he walked with up to the automatic doors at a grocery store with his little 2- year-old son holding on to his finger. You know how toddlers hold your finger? As they approached the automatic doors he felt his son pull away.

The little boy stood before the doors, waved wide his arms like a magician, and stood there arms spread with a big smile on his face.

There was a Starbucks Coffee shop right inside the doors, and seeing the little boy standing like a composer who had just conducted the Philharmonic orchestra, they applauded.

Strange, isn’t it, how something that means so much to you can be received negatively by someone else?  I just tuned into a long tirade online from an attendee at a San Jose event who took a month to recover! That was in 2012. Holy cow, I was ready to go the next day, and I am twice her age.

I suppose having Tony say if you are a pessimist you are gutless, might shake some up a bit.

Tony says we use softeners in our language, and after reading the book Taboo Language, he uses Adult Language to jolt, to emphasize, to jar people out of their present state. That might bother some people too, although he states up front, that Adult language will be used.

One reason I went to the event was to learn how to change my state. Of late I had been grouchy, irritated and angry a lot of the time.

We practiced going form sad to happy, sad to happy, sad to happy in an instant.

Although there are a million beautiful states, to think you can be happy all the time is ludicrous.

We have a two-million-year-old-brain (evolutionarily speaking) that is wired to look for saber-toothed tigers. Finding no tigers, that beautiful brain of ours looks for something else to scare us.

 It “thinks’ it is looking out for us. Misguided thing that it is.

And so the mastery in life is to control our brain instead of letting it control us. The idea is to notice the fearful thought as it passes through and let it go on past. 

And think of this. We are stupid to fuss over what is predictable,
when we know someone will mess up.

I am used to events. I’ve attended channelers, consciousness raising groups that was something akin to EST, if you remember that. Taboo language doesn’t bother me. I love it when someone goes full out. To me it like Barbra Streisand singing “Don’t Rain on My Parade.”

Hit number two: Why affirmations and presentations such as The Secret that everybody went cuckoo over don’t bring the desired results.

It takes more that positive thinking or wishing—although having a positive attitude is definitely better than the opposite.

The trick is that is whatever you put out, affirm for, focus on, or pray for must be done in a peak state. (Perhaps desperation works too, for that is highly emotional.) I’ve heard that focus and affirmations must be done with emotion, many guru’s tell us that, but few pump you up like Tony Robbins.

So do whatever it takes to put yourself the in a peak state before you ask for your heart’s desire. Music, walks in nature, whatever floats your boat.

And remember to give thanks, to live in an aura of Gratitude.

One question was: “What amount of uncertainty can you take?

We need a certain amount of certainty in our lives to function well—food, money, love, those sorts of things.

Yet we need uncertainty. The call to adventure. The urge that pulls us toward a goal, those sorts of things. We just need to know where in the spectrum we fit. Remember all passion is in the realm of uncertainty, and remember this: You are more powerful than your dopey moments.  

Watch this orangutan watch a magic trick, it’ll make you fall out of your chair.


Saturday, November 19, 2016

From Firewalker to Streetwalker all in One Day


 View from my seat


As I looked out over the arena I thought, here are 10,500 people all collected together, wanting more out of life, wanting to heal their hurts, wanting to be happy.

Happy people do not kill others for the fun of it. Happy people do not shoot up schools, or cause war. Happy people want to serve, they want to pass on what they have discovered, they want to uplift.

And because of all us attendees at the Tony Robbins “Unleash the Power Within” event, paying our entrance fee, collecting together on a grand scale, the people of the San Jose area received one million free meals.

This contribution probably comes from Tony’s background of growing up without things like FOOD. One year someone gave the family a Thanksgiving, or some holiday, meal. While his father saw it as evidence that he was not adequately supporting his family, Tony saw it as food. That father was one of three to come--most confusing to a young child.

As I sat down at the railing overlooking the main floor, my seat companion said he was from Grant’s Pass Oregon—another Oregonian, what are the chances? He works for the corporation of #Dutch Brothers—the coffee people. 

Paul was a live-wire, a young man, not one who looked corporate. When they asked him if he wanted to be corporate said, “Do you know who I am?

It must have been his enthusiasm.

The Dutch Brothers company uses many of Robbins’s principals in their business, he said, and he was there because the company sent him and 29 others to this event. They sent them on the company plane and put them up at the Hilton.  My kind of company!

I said that the servers at Dutch Brothers are always so nice and asked if they train them.

No, he said, “You can teach a monkey to make coffee, but you can’t teach him to be nice.”

“Don’t sit together, the manager had told their people. “Spread out. Have your own experience.”

I’m going out of the house in a little while, think I’ll have a Dutch Brother’s coffee. We  have a Keogh within a mile of where we live. I am supporting them royally from now on.  Great coffee too.

I looked online and found this picture "#Dutch love that goes viral."




Thank God for Angels:

Earlier that first morning I took the train from my motel into where I thought I was going, The San Jose Convention Center. There were three fellows on the train also going to the Robbins event, and one, who had registered the night before, knew what he was doing. “Follow me,” he said. “It isn’t the convention Center. It is the SAP, the Hockey Arena.”

The train didn’t go to the Hockey center. Our stop was at the convention Center.

Out came the cell phones as the three fellows searched for directions. “It is about a 20-minute walk to SAP,’ my first angel said. “Are you up for walking? “

“Sure, “ I said, backpack on my back, an easy carry. We were warned to bring jackets as the arena would be cold, and bring snacks and water as well, necessary to keep our energy up. Some days there would be no lunch break.  

And then at the end of the day—hey, I bet you thought I was going to give you the low-down on the event. Uh, uh, uh, first you must throw rocks at the hero.

You know we are the heroes of our own story…

Walking on hot coals is nothing compared with trying to find ground transportation in San Jose California at 2:30 A.M.

We got out of the event at around 2 in the morning, as the firewalk occurred around midnight. I wondered how I would be getting home, for I was not walking downtown to the train stop, besides the train had stopped running.

I figured taxis might be standing in line outside the arena, as they do at the airport.

Nope.

I had a UBER app. “No cars available.” it said.

Okay, I called a taxi.

At this time all 10,497 people of the 10,500 event participants had mysteriously blown away like Mary Poppins ‘competitors for the job as a nanny.

Three girls were sitting on the curb.

I was one.

A cab came. We three shared it.

“Take us to the closest stop first," we said. I do believe it was me, but the other girl said it was her, so I said ok. This was after the endless debate by the two girls on where they were going. One had two options, the other fussed with the driver telling him where to go, where to turn, although he had a GPS right before his eyes. The other girl hinted about staying with me, but I only had a queen bed, and I wanted to flop on it---alone.

“Is it closer to Milpitas, or Campbell?” the girl asked. “Give me an address, “said the driver.

After the first girl was dropped off, the driver said, “Now we are closer to Campbell.”

“I am not going to ride to Campbell and back,  said the dragon that reared up inside me. “Take me to my hotel.”

He did…but that’s not the end of the story.

It turned out that there were two motels by the same name, and I was dropped off at the wrong one. 

When I walked to what I thought was my room, the taxi was still sitting in the driveway while the girl debated. Nope, I thought. You are not staying with me.

Something didn’t feel right, so I went into the lobby. There was the same man who had checked me in the night before.

However, I was not registered there.

 “You checked me in last night,” I said.

“It was at the other motel. I work at both.”

 “Where’s the other one?’

“Right down the road.”

I knew I was on the right road, just a wrong street number.

“How far?”

“Right down the road.”

That guy wasn’t much help.

“I’m walking,” I said, and took off.

So I walked the five blocks down 1st street at 2:30 in the morning.

From Firewalker to Streetwalker all in one day.

But I made it home to a hot bath.


To be continued.