Mindfulness, Meditation and Motivation

Mindfulness Meditation and Motivation Your Amazing Journey Within Starts Now

Jim Killon

Dedicated to those who found true wealth that could not be obtained in a world of money, power, people and possessions.

Mindfulness, Meditation and Motivation Your Amazing Journey Within Starts Now

Other Publications by Jim Killon A Gringo in Peru- A Story of Compassion in Action Living Large Living Deliberately Atheists Don’t Eat Their Children The Best Damn Book About Sales That You Will Ever Read The Changes That You Deserve Infringe Me? A Solution to Consider For Gun Violence in America Silver Linings - Words of encouragement, love and being limitless Thumper’s Gospel - A cautionary tale of deceit, manipulation and destruction, in the name of Jesus When “Bad” Things Happen To Good People Like You Changes for New Hope Humanitarian Magazine

Mindfulness, Meditation and Motivation Your Amazing Journey Within Starts Now

Jim Killon

Copyright 2020 by Jim Killon All Rights Reserved

The intellectual property of the author has been asserted.

No portion of this work may be reproduced in any manner without prior permission from the author except as allowed by law for critical commentary, literary review or fair use purposes.

Introduction

The idea of mindfulness, meditation and motivation did not suddenly appear on our horizon last week. People have been using an array of methods of mindfulness and meditation for thousands of years. The results for those who use it with consistency can be life altering and beneficial to one’s health, both mentally and physically, create a positive attitude in relationships at home and at work and because the results can be infectious, it can create an environment that one can step into every day.

Mindfulness simply means focusing on the present moment and being aware of the occurrences around you without drifting into the past or concerning yourself with the future. Meditation is an emptying of the mind, clearing your thoughts out for a space of time and allowing yourself to be in a tranquility and peaceful state. It can be done by anyone, at anytime and anywhere. It is best accomplished when you can be in a quiet place without distractions for ten minutes or more. There are many misconceptions about meditation that I will address in this book for you. It is not necessarily a religious exercise or a new age hippie thing. You don’t need to buy anything special to facilitate your experience because everything that you need to benefit from the experience is already within you. Meditation is not just sitting there doing nothing. There is a whole range of things that occurs when you use meditation

correctly including, for example, new brain connections and chemical triggers that your brain secrets to calm you and help your organs to function more efficiently.

Science and medicine are now embracing the benefits of mindfulness and meditation.

EEG machines, that measure the brain wave activity, can record the happenings in the human brain when a person meditates. The benefits go all the way down to your body’s cellular level and affect the DNA in the nucleus of your cells.

The benefit for you personally will depend on your simple participation and consistent practice in meditation. Just like going to the gym, how strong you want to become will depend on how many reps you do and how often. Your own mind is a powerful tool and with consistent practice the results will be evident. Will you see results immediately? I can assure you that you will not. Rewiring your brain means that you need to replace old habits and thinking with new, better and beneficial disciplines.

Your brain will resist those changes because your brain accepts things just as they are now as a safe and familiar place. To obtain something new into your life you need to do something new.

Your brain’s function is to keep you alive. Your happiness, optimum conditioning, forming new habits, becoming more creative, intuitive, building new connections and synapses and minimizing negativity that doesn’t serve you well are all changes. The brain resists changes. Meditation helps us to override those resistors and delve into new ways for our brain to function. We learn how to respond to circumstances instead of reacting to them. We train our minds to seek out opportunities instead of living in mediocrity and just accepting whatever comes our way. In short we are going to learn methods for living life on your own terms, learning how to trigger those “feel good” brain chemicals into your system at will and minimize the stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline when they are no longer needed in “fight, freeze or flight” situations.

Creating tranquility within us has always been possible, albeit our racing minds and overthinking has distracted us from discovering this place, until now.

My own introduction to mindfulness and mediation came as a result of a series of negative and painful experiences that lasted far too long and from too many

directions all at once. Everything was going wrong in a deluge of events and there were no available solutions to bail me out of the trauma and dramas. I was in a fit of deep depression. I was unable to do much more than get up, sit in a chair and stare at the wall while dwelling on the circumstances that were absorbing me and pulling me down into a perilous abyss. A week passed, then another week, then a month and by time a second month passed I thought I had better do something because if I didn’t soon, all that was left to do was die. I wasn’t taking care of myself, wasn’t eating or sleeping or tending to my personal care. It was a chore to just get up and cross the room. There was no one to talk to about it and even if there was I don’t think I would have bothered. Maybe you can relate and have had similar experiences.

While the details are not important, the deliverance sure is. I thought back to a time when things were just this horrific. I was nineteen years old. What did I do back then to pull myself out of that serious condition before it became tragic? I remember being in a shop in West Virginia that had all sorts of new age stuff that was popular back in that time. It was the late 1970s as I recall. Incense and candles and crystals and such, but what grabbed my attention was a cassette tape. The title was “Letting Go of Stress” and it jumped out at me so clearly that everything else was a blur. I bought the cassette tape and took it back to where I was staying in nearby Hancock, Maryland. I put the tape on and lay down on the bed. I closed my eyes and let the words and gentle music surge into my mind. The first part was muscle tension relaxation. About fifteen minutes later I realized just how tightly wound I was and how much better I felt using the technique it suggested. The second section was breathing exercises.

Apparently there is a proper way to breathe to obtain a calm and relaxing experience.

Another fifteen minutes and I was totally relaxed and calm. The stress factors that had brought me into such a deep depression had faded away. The next section on the flip side was something called guided imagery which took me to a beautiful beach with a blue ocean to my left as I walked along a pure white sandy expanse of tropical beach.

The mental images were so real that I actually felt as though I was there. Wasn’t it just a simple cassette tape? How could gently spoken words and soft music have such a

profound effect on my physical reality? I shared it with others who had experienced the same sense of calm.

This was my first experience with mindfulness and meditation. The tape was so powerful and beneficial to me that I listened to it every night for five years before I ever heard the end of it because it put me to sleep before the tape ended. The reason we don’t have cassette tapes anymore is because they tended to break after being played for so long. Mine suffered a similar fate but the ability to use the messages on my own was deeply implanted in my mind and helped me for years afterward.

I don’t know how life got in the way and what other influences had caused me to let those experiences fade away but here I was forty years later in a similar state of affair that was drowning me and I had to either sink or swim. I knew the choice was mine. I was living in one small room of a building that was under construction in the Peruvian Andes. I slept on a mattress propped up on wooden fruit crates. A rustic table and a wicker chair I was sitting on was the only furniture. The cement walls were painted white and the effect was that of a jail cell. I had self-incarcerated myself emotionally and physically. The only luxury was the internet connection made available from the hallway outside. With energy that was borrowed from a devastated heart and mind, I linked onto YouTube. I typed in “Meditation” and hit enter. Unlike my previous experience decades ago when I had one lone cassette tape, YouTube had thousands of options for me to choose from. I was sitting in the chair from sunup to sundown anyway so listening to hundreds of hours of motivation, encouragement and emotionally comforting videos all day and into the night was simple. It was all I did for many weeks. Mindfulness and meditation seemed to be the common thread.

I am a firm believer that what you see and hear is what you become. The results were neither miraculous nor instant. By the end of the first week I felt a glimmer of hope and encouragement. By the end of the second week I was practicing some of the methods I was learning and getting limited but clear results. I believe I was listening to those videos all day every day for about a month and I didn’t restrict myself to the ones that would tell me what I wanted to hear. If some were a kick in the butt to get

me up and moving, I took it in. If it was a compassionate pleading or a strong, no nonsense message of self-empowerment, I took it too. I never felt sorry for myself, I was just in a bad place emotionally and mentally from taking hits from many various directions, unfairly so, all at the same time and I did not know how to manage them.

Now I was putting what happened to me in perspective. I could not deny or understand what happened or why, but I could manage how I responded to all of it and break it all down into bite sizes. What I needed to do was to literally re-wire my brain. Not only my thoughts but actually how my brain processed thoughts and feelings. If I could command my brain to stop pumping cortisol and adrenaline into my system which facilitated my stress, depression and constant sense of impending doom, and instead triggered my prefrontal cortex to produce a flow of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin, I would be a new man. I had to become a new man because the old man was burnt out, totally spent and wasted away. This was my “A-Ha” moment. An enlightenment. Only those who realize they are sick seek remedies.

Mindfulness, the focus on right here and now, replaced the resentment and anger of the recent past. It erased the anxiousness of what the immediate future would impose upon me. This didn’t happen all at once and the baby steps I needed to take to get “There from Here” was painstakingly slow. I had to be determined and deliberate.

I knew though that I had to do it and if I practiced this consistently, it would be a permanent change in my physiology, my mindset every day and my precarious health.

Said another way, I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Meditation came easier.

It seemed to be sparking a reaction in my being that eliminated my “monkey mind” as it is called, the crazed swirling and bouncing of thoughts and feelings and a sense of calm, wellbeing and peace replaced it. I became centered and able to focus on positive, healthier and happier outlooks.

I became a mindfulness/meditation/motivation junkie. I use it every single day, usually in the mornings when I first wake up. With a mind that is focused, clear and centered and an anticipation of joyful and beneficial happenings throughout my days, I have been able to create the life I wanted to live and do so without any forced effort at all.

It just flows. It had so altered my thought processes and attitude that the normal

hustle and bustle of everyday life, which grinds us down, seemed to melt into just a minor annoyance that I could push aside and continue with my positive experiences.

Just meditating ten minute a day. I allowed the time travel to the depressing past and the anxiety of future events, which would probably never actually happen to fade and vanish. I owned my Now. Mindfulness/meditation/motivation led me to other avenues of self-help and life enhancement. I read everything I could from others that taught on the subject. There is a whole science behind how this all works. In meditation, my mind opens up and in a clear uncluttered state of being where solutions just seem to become obvious. Time and space, both of which are man-made so we can manage our physical world, seem to dissipate and an hour can pass without me noticing how long I was simply in a meditative state of peace. I keep a journal and review my writings to gauge progress.

The power of our minds can do amazing things for us and to us. Our brains hear our words coming out of our mouths and believe everything we say. Positive words will induce positive results as well as negative words that will destroy us if we allow it.

Many people want to blame others for their miseries in life but if we can embrace the idea, that it is up to us, and we can manage ourselves with practice, the power to live according to our greatest expectations and desires becomes our new reality. In neuroscience there is something called the Reticular Activated System (R.A.S. for short) which filters what we see around us. If we buy a new car, it seems like we start seeing that same car everywhere. If you glance around the room you are in right now looking for everything that is red and close your eyes trying to remember everything that was green, you would be hard pressed to do it. Your brain was only trying to see red things. Now, imagine if you decided tomorrow that you would see things that are beautiful and encouraging to you. You would still see the reckless driver, the agitated boss, the coffee you spilled in your lap is still hot, but those things just seem like minor annoyances as opposed to things that would “Ruin your whole day.� This simple example is a quick snapshot of what I am going to be sharing with you as you read this book. I want you to become empowered and learn techniques that have well served billions of people on the planet for many centuries.

It may be new to you and that will make it seem strange but so was sex before you ever did it. Or driving a car. Or making dinner. Or walking if you can remember that far back. If you read this with an open mind you will receive the intended benefits.

As you practice them for just ten minutes a day, they become your daily routine and you will flow into the power of it automatically. You will own your mind. Few people actually do. They are pushed and pulled and their minds are loaded with opinions, thoughts, ideas, influences and decisions that are not their own. Turn off your T.V. If you happen to be taking medicine for issues like hypertension, your blood pressure, anxiety or you are seeing a mental health professional or medical doctor for health concerns, kindly understand that this is not a substitute for medically supervised recommendations. If and only if your health care provider recommends a different course of action or a different prescription, should you alter it. Be sure to share with them your mindfulness/meditation/motivation experiences and let them determine how well it is working and together you both can decide what is right for you. What I share in this book are my experiences and results, I am not a doctor.

Lastly, if you embrace a particular faith, religion or a certain belief system, this will not interfere with what you may hold dear. The practices that I teach and share here are absent of any dogma, rules or regulations, do’s and don’t or consequences if you do not adhere to it. If you happen to have no such belief systems equally, my teachings will not introduce or encourage you to embrace one. On this account you are completely on your own. The beauty of mindfulness/meditation/motivation is that it allows you to become your very best self, closer to the person that you have always wanted to become and because we are all different, the results of this experience will be uniquely your own. Be prepared to enjoy your life on your own terms and allow yourself this opportunity, without preconceived ideas, to tell you what it is supposed to be like. Give yourself a fair opportunity to try the methods, test them for yourself and allow your very best self to emerge. Realize that you are building a lifestyle on your own terms and the way you dreamed life could be.

What is Mindfulness?

Maybe you didn’t hear the term twenty years ago. More specific than the word “meditation” which has conjured up images of hippies, new age ideologies, healing crystals, ashrams, mind control and religious cults, mindfulness shares the simple practice of being in the present moment. Fully aware of the here and now.

So often we do things in our daily lives by routine while our minds wander off into our imaginations and thoughts that may not be serving us very well. Have you ever driven home and not remembered the route along the way? How often are our lives a routine of the same thing done the same way day after day? We wonder why we feel the same way all the time and maybe it is because we are addicted to our routines which give us the sense of normalcy. For many, life is as interesting as the droning hum of a ceiling fan. Our whole life is a blur of white noise. To try something different is uncomfortable, it disrupts our routine, hence our sense of normal. It is time now to make that disruption a deliberate alteration of everything that you have accepted as your routine and prepare yourself for an adventure into the vast depths of possibilities that lay dormant in your mind. It has always been available to you but change is perceived as painful by your brain that loves consistency and familiarity. What if it isn’t painful? What if it was more pleasurable as anything you could possibly imagine and even greater pleasure than you have ever experienced? What if it were the key to ultimate happiness, contentment and control of your life to live it on your own terms? That would be worth checking out wouldn’t it? Cut off the sandbags that weigh you down and let your balloon fly.

Well, those who have stepped into the realm of mindfulness and meditation have experienced exactly that. Its simplicity is probably why most people overlook it.

Simply put, mindfulness is being aware of your present state, your present place and your present condition. Here and now. We think life has to be complicated and a struggle like climbing a mountain or learning a new language. People are accustomed to having to spend money to buy tools and materials that might help them advance faster and easier. However, in meditation you only need to close your eyes and learn how to breathe yourself into a new state of being. There is no special clothing, place in particular to go to or person to listen to for it to be

effective for you. It is entirely and completely your journey that you begin with and for yourself. YouTube has thousands of gentle music programs for free to listen to that may help you ease into relaxation. Some people like to burn incense because the smell of it is appealing to them. It is such a simple and open ended practice that whatever works for you to help you move into a state of calmness and focus is good. Obviously, the ideal would be in a quiet place, perhaps in your home, that you can control any distractions and interruptions for the next thirty minutes.

However, I have been able to isolate distractions and interruptions around me so that I can meditate and practice mindfulness while standing in a line in the bank or grocery store or on a plane or crowded bus. My focus is inward and powerful so the outer environment around me pales and fades from my attention. In time, you will be able to do this as well. Mindfulness, the focus on current and present moments is a tool for you to use to become that person you have always wanted to be. You don’t need to “Make it happen” but to the contrary, you allow the calmness to flow to you like a wave in the ocean as you sit on a beach. It comes to you, you aren’t going after it. We have been too accustomed to controlling, now it’s time to let go.

One of the things I have done to slow my racing thoughts down and bring myself to a single focus was to draw artwork. Mindfulness, focusing on the here and now, pushing aside any other thoughts behind you or in front of you, for me was accomplished when I take a pencil and start sketching with detail and intention. I became an artist when I moved to Peru and began my project for disadvantaged children called Changes for New Hope. I didn’t speak Spanish yet so my project incorporated artwork as a way to develop self-esteem and it was a way to communicate. I was never an artist and I suppose we all have to start somewhere.

For me it was in the Andean mountains. Try it, you may find that you really like it.

Begin practicing a few minutes a day becoming intentionally focused on an object or thought and push aside anything that distracts you from it. Just a few minutes a day is all it requires from you. In time you will see how this positively impacts the rest of your activities during the day. You are literally re-training your brain.

Too often I observe people in states of near hypnosis as they roam around malls, down the streets and eating in restaurants. It’s as though they aren’t even there, and for all intents and purposes, they aren’t. I don’t know what is on the phone they are staring at but it has to be better than actual real life in front of them apparently. People likewise sit in a restaurant and wolf down a meal hardly aware of what it was or how it tasted. They are so focused on getting out and back to work or into traffic or home for whatever is supposed to happen next for them. People are so driven to “The Next Thing” that they miss this thing. Are we even aware that what comes next in our lives, whether in the next few minutes or the next few months, is based upon what we are learning and becoming right now?

Perhaps this is why there is so much anxiety among our human family. We are so anxious to get to tomorrow but we have no idea what tomorrow will bring us? We aren’t ready to live in our tomorrow because we haven’t finished living in our today yet. Our automatic responses are activated and we are up and ready to be defensive, hyper-aware looking for dangers, threats to our immediate safety and urgently seeking answers to questions that haven’t even been presented yet. We are like the animals in the fields that scurry out of their nests and holes to find food and scurry back quickly so something bigger and hungrier than they are doesn’t swoop down and get them. Nothing is going to “Get you” but our racing brains cannot be convinced. We live in the fear of the unknown because it is created by the fear we brought into the day with us. Of course bad things can happen that are beyond our control. Someone may blow a red light and broadside your car possibly injuring you seriously. You could get trapped in a burning building or a thug may drag you into an alley while you walk home. But how often has that ever happened to you? The news media is constantly sharing such events but hyping fear and dread is what they are all about. How many times has this actually ever happened to you? It could happen tomorrow or never, so why not live as cautiously, but not in constant fear and paranoia, as possible and enjoy your today, your now? According to one report, continuously watching the negative news on television can cause PTSD. Else you may find yourself looking for terror behind every rock and around

every corner and you will be resorting to pills to make you feel artificially and temporarily better. I have endured, suffered through and struggled past so many negative situations in my life that I could top almost anyone’s stories. Those aren’t the stories that I care to share with the exception of how they made me stronger, deeper and more compassionate as a human being. They may be new traumas coming at me one day but not today! I am not living from one misery to the next. I am living from one victory to the next. I won’t stop, quit, back down or surrender to what tries to bury me. As a result, the only thing there is for me to do is rise above it and from past experiences I have learned how. What if my head was only in the future and not focused on the deliverance I needed at the present time? I would have never learned how to fly higher than the challenges could reach me. I would never be able to write this book for you. I would be waiting for the Calvary to blow its bugle and ride over the hill to save me instead of learning how to circle my own wagons and save myself. Your hero is you and the heroism in already within you.

People have their own struggles, so they are not coming to save you.

Today is your gift. Mindfulness is the way that you will use to unwrap this gift we call today. Life. Here and Now. The opportunities are not coming, they are with you already. Greatness is already within you, you simply need to be aware of it and understand how you are a great person. We can plan for the future, that’s why we go to universities and read about investments and have children. Mindfulness is the practice of managing your day, your hour and even your minute to be the best that you can be in this moment. When we know more, we can do more, wouldn’t you agree? We become valuable not by the plans for the future but what we do in this day that gives us joy, provides solutions and embraces us closer to our human family. When we learn to create the environment we wished for, we have power.

The idea of trying to have a better past is useless, it is gone, history and will never be re-lived again. Yet people ignore their Now and the present moment to try to reengage in the past, memories and circumstances that were angry, bitter or frustrating.

It is as though they think that somehow remembering the past and reliving it will bring about a better outcome. What if you think of a very snappy comeback to that

person you had an argument with at work? Too late now isn’t it? The depressing state you put yourself in to do the “What If” game is unbearable. It should be intolerable to you to allow yourself to drift back to those memories that made you miserable then and now will make you miserable all over again. The cost? It is your Now, your present moment of life that you toss away to try to dig up feeling of remorse, revenge, guilt and animosities. Worse yet, it gets a lot easier the more often you do it. People relive divorces, terminations from jobs, unfairness and abuses between each other in relationships long ago. People and circumstance that can no longer hurt you again suddenly are hurting you again, but this time, by your own doing. Mindfulness is a medicine that helps soothe, relieve and relax you from the miseries of the past. Let your mind focus on what you can do for yourself and therefore your environment around you by using your abilities to meditate, find gratitude in this day and this time.

You cannot hang onto the past and the present moments at the same time. The human brain cannot react to two different stimulations simultaneously. Might you find yourself happier and more content to embrace today which you have full control over instead of wrestling with the past?

You might ask, “What if my memories were pleasant?” I have some very pleasant ones myself. I drift back to experiences that brought me a lot of joy and were beautiful that I never want to forget. I go back to when I was 22 years old and went skydiving which was like floating through a dream effortlessly. I loved that experience and even dream about it sometimes. I remember snorkelling with my son in the Mexican Caribbean many years ago swimming with the colored fish everywhere in water that was warm as a bath in the tropical sunshine. Just as negative memories would make me feel bad all over again, these wonderful experiences make me feel great all over again too. I just need to appreciate them and bring my desire to feel that way again into my present day. I need to make today matter as much as those great days of the past did.

Else I can get stuck there and not create anything new. Let me share an example with you using a man I once knew named Matt. I had known Matt since high school or before. He was a trained boxer and became quite good. In fact he was an amateur golden gloves champion by the age of nineteen. Matt had a bit of an ego. To say he

had an ego was like saying Steve Jobs had a computer. Everybody knew how great Matt was because he kept reminding everybody. He was so in love with his accomplishment that anything else he ever did in life paled in comparison. Matt was living and re-living in his glory days while his present life was fading right before his eyes. He suddenly found himself in his mid-fifties, broke, on the losing end of a string of torrid but loveless relationships and juiced every night in bars and parties trying to keep the image alive, he drowned into a deep pool of alcoholism. All that remained alive for Matt was his unquenchable ego which alienated him from friends and acquaintances by his insatiable need to be right in any conversation or argument.

Living in the past literally destroyed him though the past was the only bright spot in his life ironically.

There needs to be a balance between what we need to remember to keep us out of a similar predicament and the memories that we cherish to remind us how alive we always want to be. The most important and vibrant time of our life however needs to be right here and right now.

That became apparent to me when I was about to bail out of a small plane at 3000 feet over a Maryland farmland with a parachute I hoped would open. “Remember your emergency procedures. If your chute doesn’t deploy, getting your reserve open as fast as possible becomes the most important moment of your life.” My jumpmaster shouted to me. I recall those words throughout my life ever since when facing trying circumstances. “This is the most important moment of my life”. It has served me well and helped me to stay mindful even before I understood the value and importance that mindfulness was. As you read this book, allow this moment to be the most important of your life presently. The words need your complete attention and understanding. Let everything else blur for the moment, you can get back to it later.

Just like driving home in a haze of thought and you arrive without realizing how you got there, you can blow through these words and chapters without focusing on the message and comprehending what you can get out of the reading. Take your time.

How often do we do this in our relationships? “Did you hear a word I said” a wife may ask her husband? When my wife speaks to me, I make it a point to stop what I am doing, put down the book or look up from my laptop and look at her eye to eye and listen intently to her words to me. I repeat back what I think she means and she knows I am respecting her enough to give her my undivided attention. “This is the most important moment of my life” I think to myself. Whatever she is trying to communicate to me may be of minor or major importance to me, I will never know unless I am mindful of her and what and why she is telling me something. There is another reason I do this which, while not directly ties to mindfulness, is still imperative to my understanding of my wife. She only speaks Spanish or Quechua and my understanding of Quechua, a native Peruvian language of the Incas, is nonexistent. My Spanish is understandable and my understanding is good, if I pay close attention to what anyone says to me. If there is a word I don’t understand I will stop her and ask her to tell me in a synonym so I can comprehend. We have been together going on eight years as of this writing and between her patience and my focus and the love we have between us, we are doing pretty well. I am the same way with our daughter. Ever since I was a little boy I was frustrated whenever adults would shoo me away because they were busy. Maybe what I had to tell them was of utmost importance to me. They couldn’t be bothered. Whatever I am doing, I can always get back to after I focus on her tale of school activities or to watch her play with her dolls and help her build a doll house. “This is the most important moment of my life.” She won’t be a little girl forever. I will not be able to get these memories back if I never create them in the first place. Do I have time for her? I have all the time in the world to create and cherish this here and now with a beautiful little child who loves me in such an innocent and complete way without reservation. How many opportunities do any of us have like this? Be mindful, it is life itself that we are embracing or tossing away to be preoccupied by distractions that surround us.

Mindfulness In Your Daily Life

If there was one “secret� about how to practice mindfulness in your daily life I would say it is to practice simplicity. Mindfulness to bring your focus and awareness to the here and now is so much easier when you do not allow your life

to be hijacked into complications and mental gyrations that surround you.

Certainly, those issues at work, home, in traffic and in public venues have to be negotiated, but they do not have to control you. When you release your attachments to their importance to you, you inevitably find the “problems of the day” diminishing and you realize that at the end of the day, everybody lived.

People seem to want to maximize the importance of whatever they are going through which I feel is based in ego. Egocentric attitudes make a simple inconsiderate driver in front of you into a road rage incident where you spend the next several miles catching up to them and “showing them a thing or two.” The rude comment by a co-worker prompts you to find that perfect cutting comment that they surely deserve. We trigger adrenaline and cortisol which rushes into our bloodstream in a fight or flight moment that was neither necessary nor effective to resolve anything. People do not think of the consequences or long term effects of their actions and words. You got your retort out to that belligerent co-worker, now you have to deal with their passive aggressive attitude toward you for the rest of the day, or week, or month. Nice going. In the end it is like wetting your pants, nobody feels it except you.

Practicing mindfulness means you learn to let things pass by you. They are not important in the moment and they will be less important as the day goes on and you get busy on something else. Mindful people have learned to see that a person’s rage and anger has nothing to do with them and probably everything to do with the other person’s home life, mental anguish over some uncontrollable situation or some other frustration that they just tried to take out on you. It can only happen if you allow it. In reality, you have no idea what that person had going on in their lives an hour ago. Your ability to allow whatever negativity to flow past you instead of grabbing a piece of it becomes a tool for you to use every day. With practice, it becomes a way of life for you. In the days before my own enlightenment to this practice I took issue with everything. Nothing got past me if I thought someone was wronged that I cared about. It didn’t even have to be me.

The thoughts of how to right this wrong in my ego driven Don Quixote manner

created more trauma and drama than it ever brought solutions. I was the caretaker of everybody regardless if my help was asked for or not. Some things are worth the fight. Some causes need to be addressed, argued for and standing your ground is sometimes a good and necessary thing. I have found that this is a rare occasion. Prevention is far more potent. Creating the environment that you want to live in and stepping into it precludes most aggressions that you may need to endure and encounter. Look at social media tirades, a month later it is forgotten.

People have attention spans of just five seconds, a goldfish’s is six.

One of the irritations where I live in Peru is the incessant blowing of taxi horns.

Unlike 1st world conditions where taxis look for passengers to wave them down, Peruvian taxis blow their horns at every single person that they drive past letting them know they are available. Sometimes they will blow their horns as they drive up the street at nothing at all. It is a nuisance and quite an irritation. I put cotton in my ears to dampen the sound because it is such an annoyance. Then I began to put my finger to my lips as taxis blew their horns at me. Shhhh. A passive way to let them know it isn’t necessary. As it turned out it seemed to work. Without conflict or confrontation, a simple visual gesture was enough. Mindfulness, be in the moment, what is the least aggressive manner to quell any conflict? Seek out a way toward peace and tranquility and then allow your environment to become peaceful.

I will be the first to concede that nothing works 100% of the time, but I reflect on the greatest baseball player I ever met, Cal Ripken Jr. whose batting average was .

278 meaning he struck out almost ¾ of the times he came up to bat. He was a heavy hitter slugger and what worked for him only 25% of the time was enough to etch his name among the greats. Practicing non-aggression, non-resistance, is exactly that, a practice. It is something that you will get better with as you do it more often. There are days that a series of opportunities string themselves together just for that purpose. Just the other day I went to the store to buy a kilo of sugar.

The lady weighed it out on her scale and quickly pulled the bag off and tied it up. I put the bag back on the scale. Short 5 grams. Last time she was short several grams as well. Why even have a scale if you’re not going to weigh things accurately, I

thought to myself. It seems to be a common practice which can be spotted by how quickly they pull the bag off the scale. People were behind me waiting to be served.

I looked at the lady who was embarrassed, not for shorting me but because I caught her. Why make an issue over a small thing? “Next time, you owe me one kilo and five grams.” I said to her. Solution and not letting it go but not ruining everybody’s day with a confrontation either. Mindfulness. What was important was getting the sugar for my coffee and getting home without disrupting my peace and tranquility. I won. We don’t have to take issue with everything.

The same day I went to the laundromat that does my clothes. A small luxury to have them done there which gives my wife a break from washing them in a basin by hand as most Peruvians do. I was assured they would be ready by noon. At 2 p.m. I arrived to be told, “Not ready yet.” Ok. A few hours later I returned, they were ready and handed them to me in a ratty, worn out shredded yellow bag which I was sure would fall apart before I could carry it home. “Where is my new blue bag I brought my clothes in?” I asked. They tried to tell me this is the same one which was almost laughable because it wasn’t even the same color. I simply smiled, “I’d like to have the bag I brought them in please.” They said they would exchange it back when I returned the next time. My experience was that that would never happen. I just smiled. They made a call to the owner and my bag was brought back and my clothes transferred within minutes. I said my “Thank you” and off I went.

Mindfulness does not mean you have to be a doormat for people to walk all over you. You do not have to tolerate, permit or endure a life of abuse and sacrifice to maintain mindfulness. Your own respect for yourself is important too. That seems to be a misconception and while you are aware you are no greater than anyone who ever lived, neither are you lesser than anyone who ever lived. In the past, as I realized what they were trying to pull, I would have bounced off of the walls with righteous indignation, but to what end? I would have complained to co-workers (who wouldn’t have cared anyway) about it venting my anger and frustration until I felt better. Guess what? You never feel better venting your anger and frustration because you are on a roll that, like a downhill snowball, only gets bigger as you feed

into it. I got my sugar, had my coffee, got my laundry home and everybody lived. I never lost my smile, never felt anything but a sense of accomplishment that what I set out to get done that day actually got done. I win. If you are not mindful, you can easily get lost in the weeds. Be good to yourself, you deserve a calm life experience.

I share these stories not to be a “self-licking ice cream cone” but to share that if I can bring myself from a confrontational, ego driven person that took issue with everything that I encountered to become a person who is focused on peaceful interactions, even when conflict and disagreement is possible, and flow in a state of tranquility and non-resistance, then you can too.

It takes practice to be non-confrontational. My first form of martial arts that I learned was Aikido. It is the Japanese art of fighting by not fighting. I was taught, to my great disappointment, to become the eye of a hurricane and not get caught up in the storm itself. In a circular motion, move adversities around you and do not encounter them head to head. Aikido seemed to be more of “getting out of the way” than to smash an opponent. In 2005, I was attacked by six young men in front of my house trying to rob me. They said they wanted to invade my home and rob it too. It was that eye of the storm that prevented them from shooting me, taking anything out of my pockets, not being able to land a blow on me nor get into my house. Four of the six were arrested within minutes. One sits in jail today, more than fifteen years later, for that and other crimes. I learned from masters that the martial arts is a way of life that teaches the fragility of the human body and more so of the human spirit.

People are in pain, emotionally, physically, and their life choices and conditions are a result of acting according to their pain. Those young men did not choose a life of desperation and drug addiction. Those incarcerated in prostitution, alcoholism, drug addiction and mental rages never wanted that for themselves. Their pain, their circumstances that they never rose from, carried them to this place and their daily habits are what they have become. It is not an excuse, there is no excuse to abuse and hurt other innocent people, but it is their reason why they do it. Pain in all of its

forms cause us to say, do and react in ways that we may not if we saw another way to express ourselves. Thoughts become things so we need to be cautious about what we think about. Solutions avail themselves if we look for them.

Think of a time that you said something thoughtless that you didn’t really mean to say to someone because you were having a “bad day.” It may be to a person that you otherwise love dearly, yet words came out of your mouth that you were immediately regretting and cannot take back. There were consequences for that outburst. There goes your happy home for the night, or week. You looked like a tantrum throwing child. Drown that bad mood with a few beers, swallow a pill or smoke something to try to feel better. Done often enough you have a reliance on external solutions to try to feel better about yourself, your life and your circumstances. In moderation, a beer is a beer. In the form of dependency it becomes alcoholism, or drug addiction. Now try to imagine that vicious cycle multiplied a thousand times throughout a community among many thousands of people who are in some form of pain in various degrees. The interactions of those thousands of people all hurting from their choices in life, impossible relationships, miseries, addictions, impoverishments, attitudes, excuses and abuses and you have a snapshot of a world in crisis. What kind of reactions can anyone expect?

Eighty-five percent of people in the United States hate their jobs and show up every day just for a pay check according to several studies. The majority of Americans are on some form of medication for stress, illnesses due to unhealthy lifestyles and anxiety issues. Those medications have side effects as any doctor will tell you. The vicious cycle spirals lives out of control. Denial is a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.

Mental health professionals are compensated by insurance companies for just five visits per year, and then patients are paying out of pocket at $150+ per hour or are dropping therapy due to the costs. Their mental health issues continue to fester without medication, therapy or a way to cope. At some point that built up anger, fear, pain, frustration or rage is going to reach a breaking point. Will it be in the form of a domestic violent situation, or a bar fight, a road rage incident or a police standoff where somebody is not going home tonight? At the time of this writing,

police in the United States have shot and killed almost 1000 people each year over the last four years. People are in pain. These are people whose lives were ruined long before their final incident cost them their lives. I submit that prevention, in the form of self-care meditation, learning mindfulness, making appropriate changes can alter our environment from the inside out. We can change the world by influencing changes in people’s hearts. If we wait until a crisis hits it may be too late.

The puppet masters dangle the next fear in front of the population in the form of political instabilities, financial crisis, health pandemic dramas and media based utohs. Those of us who have turned off our televisions seem to be more content and at peace with the world. 90% of what we worry about never happens. It seems that we love to live in tribes of familiarity. Fear binds us together in that tribal sense of community, albeit negative. “You are worried about the new coronavirus pandemic? So am I! We are together in our fears and anxieties.” “What? You hate the current administration running the country too? He is going to turn us all into fodder for a foreign government. He will cut our social security and we will all die of impoverishment and starvation!” Our joint worries make us one community together in suffering. Desperation, fear, anxiety, why even get out of bed in the morning? Chicken Little was right, the sky is falling. The media promotes the tsunami of fear and anxiety because they need people to watch their station. Only fear motivates people to act in such hastened and desperate ways. When everything is going smooth, calm is a blanket of security over us, no one wants to disrupt that feeling. It also doesn’t sell newspapers and magazines. So the puppet masters have to keep the trauma hyped to hysterical levels and the vicious cycle keeps rolling along. The destruction of the human race can be predictable because they created it. It was all an illusion. At age sixty three, I have lived long enoughto remember gas lines in the seventies because the news told us there was only thirty days of gasoline left available for the general public. Killer bees were going to swarm up from South America and kill anyone outside that is in their path. The fluoride in our toothpaste is toxic, the communists will land on our shores soon, secret societies are running the country, red M&Ms cause cancer, and fast food

restaurants make hamburgers out of worms. People panicked though none of those stories were true. Those of us in a mindful state of peaceful existence see it for what it is and we do not let it ill affect our well-being that we created for ourselves.

We have chosen our path to live and the swirling catastrophes imposed on others have little impact on our lives. We take appropriate precautions but we don’t allow what we can’t fix to devastate our lives. We win!

Meditation

In a busy hustle and bustle world, the idea of sitting down, closing your eyes and meditating with your hands folding in your lap might seem like a waste of time and the point of it is lost. You don’t have time to meditate you have important things to do. Ghandi said,” I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two

hours instead of one.” What did he and thousands of Zen masters know that escapes us in the Western world of blurring happenstances? What is the power and benefits that can be found in quietness, stillness and deep state of letting go?

From an observer’s point of view, watching a person meditate is akin to watching paint dry. This is because it is completely internal and the benefits happen within the person’s brain and throughout their bodies. It also connects their life force, let’s call it energy, or Chi (also Ki) to the Asian culture, with the Universal energy that surrounds everything and permeates all things. Some may refer to this as source, soul, essence or being. Words will fade in their meaning as energy simply unfolds around you. Meditation connects you, allows you to become aware and in tune, with all things. It is not a “religious” experience per se though all religions practice some form of meditation. I embrace no particular religion personally and I benefit every day from my meditation practice which is how I start every day without fail.

There are a few things you need to know about what meditation isn’t which I want to share to dispel the preconceived ideas that inhibit the positive effects of meditation. I had a few of my own in the beginning too. First, understand that this is a very personal journey. A room full of people doing meditation practice will come away with a core sense of well-being and peace universally but their experience itself will be unique from everyone else’s because we are all unique individuals all needing different things in our lives to reach our goals. The thought of meditation may conjure up images of orange robes and little old men sitting on a high mountain in Tibet dispensing wisdom of the ages. It may remind you of movies where monks in long brown hooded robes walk around slowly chanting solemnly. I want you to be assured that meditation is as varied as you care to make it. The life force, your energy, (source, soul, Chi, Ki, you can name it whatever works for you) is not limited to a particular look or style and it certainly isn’t a depressing, life of selfsacrifice and denial. Much to the contrary, people who seek to be influencers of many people for good, humanitarians, altruistic individuals, those seeking wealth and prosperity in material things as well as internal wealth (not all wealth is measured in money) motivators, creators, artists and managers of all kinds that

practice meditation will tell you that it is a dynamic experience, life affirming and explosively energizing practice. These are just a few of the results of meditation though the actual practice itself is a quiet and introspective, experience. When you release the preconceived ideas about meditation, you allow what it is to manifest itself to you gently unfolding before you. To have expectations going in makes your meditation practice limited to your own thoughts and beliefs. Later chapters when I talk about motivation, I ask you to not seek out success from the point where you are right now. There is a whole Universe out there and humans are limiting themselves to being a better and greater identity of what they already are and always will be. Meditation allows you to let go of identity, titles, positions, ego, roles and responsibilities for the moment. We become no-thing, just for a little while so that we may become all-things.

Before I get into the mechanics of how to meditate effectively I want to share some of the benefits that meditation offers. This is not just positive thinking or affirmations that we talk ourselves into as a sort of placebo effect but the results and benefits can actually be charted scientifically on electroencephalogram or E.E.G. machines which measure brain activity and changes. Medical doctors have ascertained the benefits of meditation and many hospitals have meditation programs available to patients. A multitude of studies in different countries by sceptics and endorsers alike come to the same conclusions about the benefits of meditation done on a regular basis. Here are some of the findings that you will also be able to apply in your own meditation practice as you develop your style; 1. It reduces stress. Stress in the body is caused by chemicals called cortisol and adrenaline which wreaks havoc on your system such as creating inflammation, high blood pressure, disrupts your sleep patterns, causes anxiety levels to rise, clouds your thinking, lowers your immune system and creates fatigue.

2. It controls anxiety. Anxiety will create such issues in a person such as panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorders, fears, obsessiveness and paranoia.

Consider the ever growing list of personal issues that people suffer through every day and you will realize anxiety, that fear of the unknown that paralyzes

our decision making process and stalls our personal development, is at the root of much of it. Meditation can center us, quell the mind and help us to get control of what tries to devour us.

3. It reduces depression. People that meditate regularly find their emotional states less erratic and stabilize us to see positive outlooks and a sense of calm.

Everything can be all right regardless of what might be occurring around us.

Optimism over rides the mechanism which would lead us into a depressive state of mind. Depression is responsible for a long list of life consequences including substance addictions, family disputes and suicide just to name a few.

4. It creates self-awareness. Self-awareness is how we relate to everything around us. Many times we are ego driven and reactionary to circumstances that challenge us. Meditation helps us to remain calm, focused and look for the solutions, step away from toxic people and come back to center and stability. I find that meditation helps me to adapt and adjust to situations that I may not be able to change and develop strategies. Jettisoning the ego and realizing that we are part of a whole Universe that has unlimited possibilities for us to explore allows us to see past the finite issue that we might think is paramount.

5. It improves our attention span. Those who teach meditation in the East refer to something called “The Monkey Mind�. This is when your thoughts are jumbling around a mile a minute and you can’t focus on anything for more than a few seconds. Science has determined that the modern person today has an attention span of just five seconds. A goldfish, buy contrast, has an attention span of six seconds. Our social media posts come at us in rapid succession.

Many people are unable to put their phones down for more than a few minutes and if their phone chimes they must look at it to see who sent them a message immediately. Anxiety producing cortisol flows, our interpretation of our selfworth is based on this constant surge of wanting to be accepted by people that we may never see or meet in real life. Mindfulness/meditation brings us into the here and now. Focusing on what is important in reality and what we can accomplish from a position of emotional, mental and physical possibilities is one of the greatest benefits of meditation. I recall as I tried to read a book my

mind would wander off and by the end of the chapter, I had no idea what I read. Think about how many times we had conversations, meetings, saw programs on television or drove home and unconsciously zoned out because our minds were everywhere else. Meditation combined with mindfulness gives us the power to own our day and the time we have to accomplish our tasks effectively. Imagine how useful this would be on your job and how much more valuable you would become.

6. It improves self-care and compassion for others. Meditation is a calming and peaceful experience and process. When you enter a state of gentleness and relaxed mental focus, it is a small step away from letting go of harshness and emotional anger. In most philosophies the concept of “Loving your neighbor as yourself” exists. How can you love your neighbour, your partner in life, your coworkers, the people you encounter throughout your day if you do not love yourself? It is impossible. Do you think they don’t feel your wall up and sense of social anxieties toward them? People hide behind their masks. When we meditate we become closer to the person that we have always wanted to become. We learn a sense of self respect, self-love and self-worth. We become good to ourselves and the way we treat our mind and bodies becomes our new us. That feeling emanates outward to touch others around us. To do otherwise would feel conflicting. Suddenly we aren’t allowing small annoyances to bother us anymore like we used to in the past. We begin to become “addicted” for lack of a better word, to this feeling of well-being and fulfillment. No one can take this away from us. How we treat others, this new sense of compassion, begins to ripple out from us and others seem to treat us better as well. We literally begin to develop our own environment to live in, our own heaven on earth as it were.

7. It improves sleep. Meditation a few minutes before going to bed can lead you into a better state to fall asleep and stay there. During sleep hours your body regenerates and heals itself. It is maintenance time for you and meditation allows your mind to calm and still itself so that these repairs can happen easier.

Many report that their insomnia faded away. When you are in a positive and healthy state before sleep your mind continues throughout the night in that

state. For years I suffered from insomnia, vivid nightmares and I slept about three hours a night on average. Obviously my waking hours suffered as a result. I was unfocused, pushing myself to concentrate and after years like that it became my normal way of living. When I began a meditation practice, I was amazed to get a good night’s sleep and never knew sleep could feel so delicious and refreshing. Obviously all the other missing puzzle parts of my life came together and I was able to enjoy life in an unlimited way as never before.

8. It can lower blood pressure. Hypertension literally kills millions of people every year via heart attacks and strokes. The mental state we put ourselves into whether it is due to job conditions, relationship quarrels, schedule juggling, child raising issues, homicidal drivers out there, health concerns or that damn neighbor’s dog barking all night, hypertension can kill you. It can cripple your quality of life until it does. Think of how you react to anything when you are angry or upset. Your blood pressure rises and it only makes matters worse. Heart attacks in America happen most often between 8am and 10am on Monday mornings. People are swallowing side effect inducing medications to control their hypertension. Meditation may reduce those risks at the same time put you on a course of healthy living.

9. If It’s Free, It’s For Me! While there are books, live programs to attend, and podcasts to sign up for offered by teachers of meditation and mindfulness, the actual cost to learn how to meditate effectively is free. You don’t need to buy any special clothing to wear, any particular products, lotions, potions or ornaments.

Everything you need is already within your own mind ready to be accessed. There are no dues, no special locations to go to, no one true special leader to follow, nor pilgrimage to make. Meditation can be accomplished sitting, standing or lying down. You can meditate anywhere at any time alone or in a group if you choose to.

There is no right way or wrong way, just whatever is effective for you and you will know what that is with practice. There are YouTube videos, countless online resources to help you along the way as well as this e-book of course. Personally, I have built quite a collection of books and resources which I read and listen to

everyday. Leaders are readers and we all learn from one another. No one teacher has all the answers and solutions. Learn from as many as you can.

10. Finally, your best results in meditation will come from being consistent. This is why I recommend just ten minutes a day. In time you may find it advantageous to meditate longer. One thing that you will realize is that time will vanish. Initially you will mediate for a good hour or two only to find that a mere twenty minutes have passed. The key here is not the quantity of time meditated but the quality and experience of meditating. It is not a race. You are not rushing to get through it because that is exactly what you are trying to escape by meditating. In our bustling Western culture lives we multi-task (sure we do) we read a book by powering through it checking to see how much more we have to go to the end. We eat our meals like somebody is going to take our food away from us and we drive like there is someone at home stealing our furniture. Have you ever considered if you got home five minutes later there would be absolutely no difference in your life?

Slow down, save lives. Mediate to allow yourself to be free, to flow into a state of peace and tranquility. The objective is not to tell everybody that you meditated but to become a better version of yourself throughout the day. Those minutes meditating in the morning will impact the rest of your day if you are allowing yourself the benefits they provide. Meditation, like exercising, is a discipline, new habit that you are instilling in your daily routine. It is as pure of a self-care practice as you can possibly imagine, so why not take advantage of it and become a student of meditation? You have just this life, it is not a rehearsal and there is no sequel.

Let’s live deliberately.

How to Meditate Effectively

As I mentioned earlier, there is no one correct way to meditate. You are seeking the results of meditation as opposed to perfecting what form will get you there. I want to share with you what it is that I do when meditating. I have made my practice a composite of a few different styles all of which have specific objectives for me. This makes my meditation practice uniquely mine. In time you will develop your own

that works best for you. First remember, do not time yourself, it’s not a timed sport.

You want to allow yourself space and time to learn how to just let go.

When I first became serious about meditation, I was introduced to Reiki meditation by a French Canadian friend who is now a Reiki master. I am a second level Reiki practitioner and use this healing art as part of my daily routine. Reiki, if you do not know, is a practice developed by a Japanese man named Mikao Usui who lived from 1865-1929 and is used as an alternative therapy for the treatment of physical, emotional, and mental diseases. He had taught Reiki to over 2000 people during his lifetime. The life energy or Chi (Ki in the Japanese) is believed to flow through a person and by gently placing hands upon them, transferring healing energy to that person. I began learning about Reiki and asked my friend to not “poison the well” so to speak, by telling me what I would sense or feel or what to “expect” if anything at all. For about a month, each session of Reiki was marked by a deep sensation of nausea. Imagine that, nausea! Without a book of explanations (because one does not exist) I couldn’t just flip to the chapter and learn why. I continued doing Reiki daily anyway and the nausea passed and a sense of wellbeing and calm replaced it.

Does the healing aspect of Reiki work? Eastern philosophies have used a form of it for over a thousand years with success. Laying on of the hands is nothing new nor is it limited to one culture, religion or ideology. I believe there is much we have yet to learn about how the body and our energy/life force can heal itself. I used it on a part of my foot that was inflamed with gout or arthritis which was very painful.

After Reiki it has been fine with no pain ever since. Sceptics may say there is a placebo effect taking place just as some cancer patients recovered after taking sugar pills that they were told was a new miracle drug. Frankly, what if it is? I have used it for years and seen the results that cannot be explained. Scientists have done double blind experiments with Reiki practitioners with amazing results. It is easy to doubt something simply because we don’t understand it yet. My goal here is not to convince you one way or another about Reiki. I use it and it works for me. I try to stay blissfully ignorant about any particulars because I think getting bogged down in the mechanics of it develops opinions that draws lines and begins to isolate people

instead of joining us together. So many belief systems in life are exactly what you want to believe they are. Suffice it to say that the human mind is a powerful tool and science, medicine and quantum physics are just scratching the surface to understand the depths and dimensions waiting to be explored.

Other forms of meditation taught by various teachers, masters and sages include transcendental meditation or TM for short. This uses a mantra, which is a word repeated in a chant during meditation. The most well know styles are Vipassana meditation, Chakra meditation, Yoga meditation, Guided meditation and Metta meditation. I use Reiki and guided imagery meditation for my own practice. I may add a candle or incense just because I like the scent and I like to have the ambiance it creates for me. Some people like to play gentle meditation music in the background, I prefer silence however. There is no one “best” style and if your study one and like it over another, then that is the style for you.

Before anything else, as I sit and begin my morning meditation, I close my eyes and say, out loud, “I am grateful. Thank you.” Why out loud? It is because your brain hears everything you say and it believes everything you say, then your brain begins searching for reasons to make it true. Subconsciously, you are programming your brain to look for evidence why you are grateful and those reasons surface. I live in a constant state of gratitude. There are hiccups in my happiness because I am human in a real world too. I gently emerge from my challenges and go from gratitude to gratitude. Meditation resets my energy force to embrace all good things that are due to me because I am open to them, whatever they may be. Mindset is powerful.

You will find that gratitude is a super power. Begin every session with gratitude.

Another part of my meditation practice is breathing correctly. This is also part of mindfulness practice. There are three parts of our breathing that most of us only use one. Our daily “staying alive” automatic breathing as we go about our day. Not shallow but not deep either. If we suddenly become stressed or afraid, our primal instincts kick in, adrenaline and cortisol flood our bloodstream, our pupils dilate, our muscles tense and our vision becomes tunnelled meaning the peripheral vision

blurs, our blood thickens, our appetite vanishes and our breathing quickens and is shallow. This is the fight, flight or freeze mode we go into when we are about to be eaten by a lion or if we are in a traumatizing experience. Our human bodies haven’t changed physiologically in millions of years and still works the same. The difference is only that we are no longer worried about the lion eating us. In modern times it is getting fired, divorced, cut off in traffic, and mugged in the street as we walk home or not being able to pay the bill that just arrived in the mail. Those are very much our lions of the 21st century. Breathing correctly initiates calmness.

Our breathing during meditation helps to reset the thermostat and settles us again.

Unlike the deer in the woods being chased by a predator that drops immediately back into a calm state as soon as the threat is over, we tend to hold onto our stressors and anxieties forever. Why? If there is no longer a clear and present danger facing us why do we still react as though there was? It is because we are in a day and age where the danger doesn’t run off to go eat a different deer. The stress that we endure now is insidious, deep inside of our psyches and lasts much longer.

Have you ever gone through a divorce or know someone who has? It is like an endless loop movie replaying itself over and over every day. Lawyers are actually trained to heighten the sense of fear, dread and trauma to force the opposition to settle in their client’s favor. Have you ever worked for a miserable boss whose mission in life was to make everyone of their subordinates just as miserable? You cannot simply run away from this kind of fight, flight or freeze situation. It lasts all day, all week and until you learn how meditation can release you, it will incarcerate you for the rest of your natural life. Your escape is within. It starts with breathing correctly to calm ourselves back to a state of tranquility.

So, breathing. We rarely use the part of our breathing that would help us the most.

We have been accustomed to be in regular daily “staying alive” breathing or danger breathing. When I go into meditation, I slow my breathing down literally as slowly and relaxed as I can possibly make it. My first objective is not to breath deeply as much as to breathe slowly. I focus on my breathing only, no other thoughts, no other concerns, this is my time now. There is no where I need to be and nothing

needs my immediate attention. I am now in full control of my space and time. I take a full minute or so to focus on this part of my meditation. The air draws through my nose slowly and I exhale just as gently through my mouth. Some people hold their breath for a count of five. It is an option, I prefer not to. I live in the high Peruvian Andes and there is not a lot of air to breathe in the first place. As I breathe this way I can begin to feel a sense of calm flowing over me. This is because my brain is sensing my body, specifically with my breathing style, that everything is all right and there is nothing to be stressed about or to be concerned with.

My brain will respond by releasing those feel good chemicals into my bloodstream.

These are serotonin, endorphins, dopamine and oxytocin. Just like the stress chemicals, adrenaline and cortisol, these chemicals will flow to every organ of my body and those organs will respond just as they should. This will cause my shoulders to relax and drop down, my muscles will loosen, my jaw will unclench and I become gently aware of my surroundings with no particular thoughts about it. I am just here and now in this moment that I have allowed myself to be in and I am preparing myself for my meditation. There is a sensation of flowing. There is not an automatic snapping into it (or out of it once you are in this state.) My breathing now pushes a little deeper, not trying to force my breath but just a gentle breathing in‌.and out. Through my nose slowly in and out through my mouth a little deeper each time. If you do this and feel your muscles around your ribcage or abdomen muscles resisting you might want to take it easier and only breathe as deeply as it is comfortable for you. You are not in any hurry and there is no finish line to cross. Just focus on the experience of breathing this way until it is comfortable and relaxing for you. You will be breathing from a place much deeper than what you may be accustomed to so it may feel strange to you at first. All new things do by the way, don’t they?

Your gentle target is to focus your slow deep breathing to a point just three inches below your navel. Focusing on this point as you breathe also helps you to be mindful, being in the here and now. There is nothing behind you in your yesterday

or even ten minutes ago. There is nothing in the future whether that means tomorrow or in ten minutes, there is only….now.

While in this pattern of slow deep breathing I might be able to hear ambient sounds, dogs barking, a car horn, and someone’s television in the apartment above mine. I do not let that interrupt me, I do not try to ignore it for the same reason I would not try to not think about zebras, because suddenly all I can think about are zebras. I just acknowledge that there are sounds. Just let go and acknowledge that sounds mean nothing at this moment. Breathe and exhale.

To keep myself focused in my meditation I created a simple thing to do that causes me to focus on a single point. I lightly touch the end of my nose. Our noses are sensitive so I gently tap.. tap…tap the end of my nose very slowly until that is the only thing I am able to think of. When I stop, I am in a place in my mind that is clear, empty and ready. The chemicals that my brain released into my bloodstream a few moments ago are still there, calming, relaxing and reassuring me that everything is all right. I say to myself, “I am calm and at peace now. Everything is all right.”

Remember, your brain hears you say it so it is true and the mind follows.

I prefer to take a sitting position and uncross my outstretched legs with my back straight and supported in a chair or against a wall, my chin is up just level to the floor. My eyes are closed to prevent visual distractions. My hands are interlaced together in my lap and I continue to gently breathe in through my nose and exhale slowly out through my mouth. If thoughts pop into my head, I do not resist them, I mentally step aside and let them pass on by knowing I can address them later if I choose to. But for now, this time is mine for development, for my inner peace and creativity. This is my time to explore who and what I want to become. It is my personal evolution and internal journey. I am becoming centered using this time.

You will want to let go of the tendency to try to “feel” something or experience something. You are not going to go into a trance. Meditation is what you simply flow into, using your breathing exercise and allow your mind to empty itself of clutter, the “monkey mind”, and become like “the emptiness of a bowl”. The empty

part is the most valuable part because it holds the soup. Nothingness. We have always been taught to multi-task, hands moving in fives directions all at once, never waste a moment. It is why the idea of meditation seems so alien to people. It is allegedly “Doing nothing�. Yet people who practice meditation are more effective, clearer in their thinking, attentive in their conversations with others and make fewer mistakes in tasks they perform. As I mentioned before, in the beginning you will find your initial efforts to meditate ineffective and you may be tempted to give up because it doesn’t seem to work.

Consider however how much time and how many attempts you gave yourself to learn to text on your phone, to learn how to swim, ride a bike or even to walk. Were you great at it on the first try? No, but you kept trying because the ultimate rewards were what you were after, not the sinking or falling down part, right? Let meditation be the next success in your life that you fail continuously until it begins to become effective for you. This is why most teachers will tell you to do meditation for just ten minutes a day to begin with. Some people, who have been meditating for years, still practice meditation in the mornings just ten minutes still. It is a personal commitment and that may be all you need. Once I enter the state of a cleared mind and a place where I am at total peace and tranquility, I may choose to stay there, in a meditative state for an hour or more. That is my journey. What is best for you will become evident soon enough. Remember, meditation is a very personal experience, unique for you.

One thing I noticed is that there are at least one thousand thoughts that try to come racing into my head. Things I forgot to do a month ago, how hungry I suddenly have become, and whether I turned off the stove. These are simply distractions that everybody experiences because what you are doing is new and your brain, which has one job; to keep you safe, recognizes this new experience as an intrusion, a possible threat and tries to resist it. In short, you are not going crazy.

The next part of your meditation is to allow, (not make) yourself physically relax.

Your breathing is effective and when aided by muscle tension relaxation, it becomes

even better for you. When I do this, I start at the top of my head, down through my face and neck and continue with each group of muscles all the way down to my toes. I tense my muscles as tightly as I am comfortable and release the tension instantly. Three times for each muscle group. I continue breathing slowly and relax completely. Stress is stored in your muscles. We get sore necks, backs, legs and our faces feel like poured cement when we are tense. After I finish with the muscle tension relaxation, I go back to my stillness of meditation, breathing slowly and allowing my mind to let go of anything, everything just for this time.

If you become distracted, you may want to touch the end of your nose again. This can be your signal to yourself to bring your mind back to the stillness where you want to be. Focus again on your breathing, slowly as possible and just relax. I am asked how soon results will be realized. You literally want to forget that question. It is like falling in love with the right person, when the time is right, it will be unquestionably evident. You aren’t racing to a result, you are on a journey. Give yourself time to become what you always wanted to be in your life. Soon enough your mind will feel like a blackboard that was completely erased and there will be no distractions, no thoughts to clutter you and a pure sense of calm, peace and gentleness will be your complete experience.

When I studied the martial arts we learned quite a bit about the Chi (or Ki) energy and how to utilize it in our practice in the dojo. Patience was the first and hardest thing to accept. Everybody wanted to become a black belt. Everybody wanted to learn how to put down multiple attackers. We all wanted to be like Bruce Lee in the movies. Those that sought those things eventually faded away and went on to their next fascination. I found myself with my sensei, or teacher, one on one. I learned to breathe first. I learned patience and we went through exhausting moves slowly at first, until each move was with an exact precision. My impatience and resistance to instruction melted. I was no longer anxious to become a black belt as much as I was addicted to the discipline that was beginning to affect my job performance, relationships and how I treated my body. I had no interest in becoming a showboat demonstrating my art in some heroic rescue of an underdog somewhere. That was

Hollywood. I was more interested in learning how fragile the human body was and knowing that a simple technique could cripple an attacker if that became necessary.

Ironically, I became more sensitive to people, not just physically, but emotionally as well. Knowing martial arts taught me to be confident and jettison fear in most any situation. How many actual criminal attacks does any one person encounter in their lifetime anyway? For me, it was two. Twice in the thirty years since learning martial arts did I have to defend myself using it. I use the mental life force energies I had learned almost every single day. The martial art is a form of meditation and it was one of my first experiences going into a flow state of nothingness and complete peace. You only have to arrive there once and then, you know what it is, what it “feels like” and you are able to access that peace, and the power of mediation at will. Life becomes something that you begin to experience on your own terms. Your brain cannot focus on two opposing energies at the same time, so fear, anger, hatred, resentment and bitterness just fall away from you. Your life begins to let go of things that are no longer serving you well. Revenge, personal vendettas and callousness toward people in your life melts away and you become like a river that flows around the obstacles like the water flows around a stone. While I agree that there are no absolutes in life and perhaps it will not always work every time, it is wonderful to know that this way of becoming works more often than not. We can create the environment that we choose to live in.

At the time of this writing I am in Peru, during the 2020 coronavirus quarantine lockdown. Today the president of Peru announced the quarantine will continue past its original end of April 1st and has been extended to April 12 th. People are going ballistic about being “incarcerated” in their houses with the exception of buying food, medicine or going to the bank for even longer. The quarantine was then extended until the 26th and again until May 10th, even tightened further by establishing a curfew at 6 p.m., mandating that men are allowed out on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and women are allowed out the other days except for Sunday when no one is allowed outside. Martial law and violators have been arrested and jailed. I am writing this book for you, using my time during the

quarantine/lockdown in meditation, reading books, listening to the thousands of options of music on YouTube, doing art projects and spending precious time with my family. It is what it is and the quarantine, while an interruption of what we all would usually be doing, is designed to keep us safely isolated from others who may potentially be infected thus protecting our own lives. I can appreciate that with gratitude. Being flexible in life, as meditation teaches you to be, makes life enjoyable and bearable under some critical times that you may experience.

Meditation helps you to bounce back from disappointments in life that we all will face, with grace and acceptance. You realize that your peace means more to you that having to be right in a discussion, getting your way, or “winning.” You find yourself being a better friend, co-worker, spouse or lover, parent and neighbor.

Is it possible that meditation for just ten minutes a day can bring about all of these benefits? Can the human brain be re-wired to trigger those feel good chemicals at will and limit the “Fight or flight or freeze” adrenaline and cortisol blasts that stresses us out so often for so much of our days? I am going to tell you that this is absolutely true. I teach that meditation becomes a habit, a habit that creates certain new ways to think, feel, see the world, experience life, alters relationships and develops new connections in your brain. Your brain has something called neuroplasticity, or the ability to remold itself and re-shape itself when it is trained to do so. How’s that for living a dream? This is living deliberately. This is your new journey. Habits may take anywhere from a few months to a year to take root but then they are a permanent part of your lifestyle.

It is because there are many forms of meditation, you have the freedom to practice whichever way best serves you. At different times, based on what might be happening in your life, you can shift to a meditation style that is focused on “Mindfulness” which is to become present in the current moment and clear away past, future thoughts and memories, centralizing your thoughts on one single object of concern, issue or focus. This is not to identify with worry or stress, but for a solution or development beyond your current control or ability.

Many spiritual teachers tell us that we become what we think about all day. It is absolutely true. The reason great people do great things is because they focus on greatness and seek out how to manifest it. Likewise people who wallow in misery, self-defeating attitudes and negative self-talk inevitably create their world of misery, lack and stress. In this kind of mindfulness meditation we don’t ponder on the “How” because most of the time we have no idea how to get something done in detail. We meditate on what it is, what we want it to be, where we are in terms of resources (or the lack thereof) and simply lock our minds onto those issues pushing aside all others. Whether a solution will float to the top of your awareness in your thinking, or you are raising your vibrational field to connect to a like vibration which will generate the solution for you doesn’t matter. What is most important is that your meditation is a powerful tool and so much more than those in the Western world would like to acknowledge. Like energies attract and we already know that everything is energy, we simply have to align ourselves with the energy that will provide us what we need. A limitless life is possible for you.

You may have read “The Law of Attraction”. Some discard it as new age wishful thinking. Others have embraced it and began to understand to power of the energy that we all are. Many have been disappointed because they believed in the law of attraction and tried to manifest various things only to find nothing happened. They meditate and focus on a new car, a Lamborghini for example, a million dollars in their bank account, by a certain date or the partner of their dreams.

Disappointment in a belief system that failed them makes them wonder if even meditation is everything it was cracked up to be. It certainly is, however people never like to look to themselves as the reason their grand experiment to prove energy frequencies had failed. Our egos won’t allow it. Energy always was and always will be. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. The Universe is neutral, without favored individuals or anyone disowned among us. The best example I can share is a radio frequency. It doesn’t matter who tunes in a station, or why, the music coming out of it will be the same. Our doubt and disbelief however, throws us off of the frequency and our energies are like being between stations of the radio.

How can our doubts and disbeliefs do that? Subconsciously we feel a sense of unworthiness or we know what we are asking in our meditative states may not actually be good for us or is purely ego based. Meditation alters our thinking processes. We find the true meaning of humility and we find a love for humanity.

What we want for ourselves we also want for those we encounter as well. The very best qualities of being human surfaces and our egos seem to fall away.

An example I can share was when I finally became a successful humanitarian, appreciated, well known and loved. I had received international awards for my accomplishments in Peru and after ten gruelling years of sacrifices in the Andes, in destitute villages nobody had ever heard of, I had made my mark. More so, I wrote about my adventures in several e-books and magazine articles, making me a published author and writer. This was something I also wanted to because I believed my stories needed to be shared. I wanted to motivate others to also help the disadvantaged in the world. The artwork I was doing with the children became quite good and I exhibited it and the children’s as well, in museums and other venues. As I became more disciplined in my mindfulness and meditation practice, a series of humbling experiences brought me back into a painful reality.

I found the philosophy of the Tao. I was not looking for it or any other philosophy but here was this book on my shelf someone had given me, so I read it. Through this philosophy I learned that many of our greatest accomplishments can be diminished if they are overshadowed by ego. My identity was attached to the fact that I was a humanitarian in the Peruvian Andes helping disadvantaged children.

Attachment to things brings suffering. While that was 100% true, why did I have to keep seeking a wider and broader version of myself? I did it because others were not doing it and the kids I saw were living in destitution and despair. That is noble enough but I never actually examined what was happening inside of myself.

Attachment had its own way of ensnaring me. How could I become anything greater and better in new and exciting areas of development if I was forever identifying myself as a humanitarian, or writer, or artist? I spent many years of struggling and altruism to grow the project to reach even more children. I had to find funding for

everything I had considered vital and distribute publications to make sure everyone knew what was happening up here was imperative. I never considered it egotistical and I never received a regular salary for my work, taking only the very basics of living expenses. So why hadn’t the funding, the new doors open and the mainstream publications seek out interviews happened? I put it out there into the Universe and nothing came back. I recognized that I had become locked into my identity as just one thing. My art exhibitions and writings were also hinged on my humanitarianism. I had inadvertently pigeon-holed myself.

Identity is a title, a reputation and a position that people see you as. Like your name and the letters that follow your name. You were born simply, you. You had no religion, nor name, nor reputation, title, position, nor were you known for any one thing or another. You simply were there. In time, your family told you what to think, how to behave, called you by a name, educated you in a school, encouraged or discouraged you to do things, built or destroyed parts of your being as they saw fit.

Teachers, parents, religious leaders, friends, movies, the internet and television all were influences that you adapted to. Advertising told you what to like and buy, and you become something, someone and you adopted your identity. If you went to a foreign country and wore the traditional clothes of that culture you would feel strange, out of character. If you didn’t speak their language you would also be quite lost. Their food might surprise or even shock you. If you are unable to adapt to what the environment was there, you could expect to be most miserable. Your wellcrafted identity that you had cultivated for decades becomes an obstacle, an interference, to you. Whatever you thought you were suddenly does not apply anymore. Your normal now becomes abnormal. This is the incarceration of identity.

In my meditations I was seeking to become a better Jim Killon, from where I was and who I was, not a new and better person to be of service to the human family.

When we meditate and become clear and centered in our awareness, we are becoming a better being, not just a better lawyer or plumber or husband/wife or student in university. Growing and development means allowing yourself to expand beyond your current horizons to new possibilities that you may not even know

existed. My energy frequency was blocked by my identity to what and who I already was, not allowing me to become what infinite energy of the Universe would make me.

We are afraid to release our attachment to our current self because we may be afraid to what a better version of ourselves might do to alter our relationships, our environment and change is scary, uncertainty and who wants that? The teachings of the Tao woke me up to the idea, seemingly ironic at first, that to become great, I must first become, No Thing. How was that even possible? Consider a bowl. It is round, it has a color to it and it is easy to hold in your hands. What is the most important part of the bowl? It is the center part, the emptiness of the bowl because it is the part that holds the soup. Consider a wall. The most important parts are the holes in it. They become the door and windows that we can see out of and walk through. The part that is No Thing becomes the greatest part that is useful and important. What is blank in your life currently is the space that you will be building upon. The more empty space you allow yourself, the more you can grow and develop into your own greatness, whatever that will soon look like. To be No Thing gives you the opportunity to become All Things. Now growth is possible.

I’ll bet you never saw that one coming did you? I didn’t either and it became part of my meditation practice every day to recognize that I am No Thing. I am not my identity. I do humanitarian work even to this day and probably will until my last day.

I have done art projects that were shown in museums and other public venues. I write every day and I publish much of what I write. Am I a humanitarian, artist and author? Superficially, you can say yes. If I am asked of course I acknowledge this.

However if I am to become my greatest possiblilty, one that serves humanity and creates an environment that is conducive to that end, I must release my identity to titles, roles, positions and names and allow what awaits me to emerge and it will be, if I allow it freely to manifest. By breaking egoistic attachments you realize that while you had a hold on them, whether possessions or titles or prestige of some sort, in reality it had a hold on you too. You never even knew it, but now you do.

You do not meditate as a finite person with a title or position, a reputation or even a

name. You are simply a being, a pure essence, open to enlightenment. You allow yourself to blend into the Universe and all it contains. In short, to become No-Thing allows you to become all things. You are one with the Universe and everything it is.

Now let’s circle back to why the Law of Attraction and seeking that Lamborghini and million dollar bank account that did not happen. I asked someone once why a Lamborghini, of all cars to choose from, was the hot button for him. He told me without hesitation, “Because it’s cool. Because no one else I know has one. I want it to show everybody I have “made it.” I could just imagine this ego rolling up to his ex-wife’s house and blowing the horn all afternoon. Why was it important to impress anyone else? They will either be jealous or want to borrow it so they can impress their friends. The law of Attraction is not an ATM machine to squirt out cash for small minded pursuits which actually run afoul to what the Universe wants to teach us and help us become. Those that actually have a Lamborghini are almost afraid to drive it anywhere. People might steal it, they become targets of kidnappers and they are afraid wherever they park it someone might dent it with their car.

My best Lamborghini story comes from my past, about twenty five years ago when I was a member at a very nice gym in an exclusive part of town. My then-wife worked in the complex and I was definitely outclassed but I could afford the membership so I worked out after dropping her off in the mornings. I parked my humble little 1987 Ford Festiva next to a bright yellow Lamborghini and went in. I was quite a cut up back in those days and saw several people working out on the various machines. I had never forgotten how these snobby guys would carry themselves, all wealthy and influential pillars of society that reminded me regularly that they could buy and sell me twenty times. As the old saying goes about payback… I said excitedly, “Whose yellow Lamborghini is that out there?” One man puffed out his chest to proudly say, “It’s mine, why?” He almost crippled himself falling off the treadmill when I said, “I am so sorry…” I couldn’t even finish my sentence when he ran up to me with a blur of profanities and threats of what he was going to do to me if his precious car had a single scratch on it. We went out to examine it. Not a scratch

anywhere. “Hmm” I said, “Maybe I imagined it, sorry to upset you.” Identity can be very costly and it is indeed an incarceration. You don’t own your possessions, they own you. Meditation will make that apparent to you and you will rise above the trappings of owning stuff.

A million dollar bank account is similar to the Lamborghini story. My friend also wanted a million dollars in the bank. He could not answer my one word question, “Why?” Just to have it? Because it represented a sense of security and elitism? He had no idea what he would buy with it. Obviously a house and a car, then maybe go on a trip. I explained to him that most people who won a lottery or fell into their wealth were either dead, dead broke or in jail within three years according to studies of lottery winners. Trying to use the Law of Attraction to simply want something that would further incarcerate him was futile. There is a greater intelligence out there and it is a good thing that we realize it. Left to our own devices we would never get out of trouble. Our miseries are usually self-imposed.

Of those that I know personally who have obtained such wealth as to be parked in the one percent of all wealthy people, their goal is to first secure it with solid investments and next is to add to it, to make more money. They do not know why however. They also seem to represent the stingiest people to ever walk the earth.

Their justifications for not helping the most destitute among the world, when they have the means to do so with just their pocket change, is something I simply cannot wrap my head around. Maybe they are saving up to buy Hawaii? So sad.

The idea of meditation, as it opens a new awareness, or consciousness as it is also called, connects you to a like energy that may have been unfamiliar to you however it was always there, all around you. You simply did not understand how to access it.

I compare this to the fish swimming around looking for the water. Your goal is not to become the best meditator in the world. The extended purpose is to use the development of your brain and awareness for life as it unfolds for you to create an environment conducive to wellbeing, healthy living and a spirit of love and gratitude. It is not a struggle, in fact struggles wherever they find you, will become easier for you. Meditation becomes an overall part of the creation of a new life.

I had become a minimalist. There is nothing wrong with having a comfortable life and nice things. My home is an exercise in simplicity and void of gadgetry and entrapments of distractions. I have no attachments to things anymore. Meditation has taught me what is important and equally, what isn’t. People seem to try to find solutions by wanting changes to happen all around them. If others were nicer to them, if their surroundings were different. They rarely look inwardly to create a better perspective of life. They can’t seem to realize that the world won’t change because they want it to but they have the power to become an adaptable person, flexible in the winds of life that would allow them to flow with the worst of storms.

Coping strategies are missed by many people because they are waiting for things to get better. There will always be a crisis whether today or next month. Something is not going to happen according to your liking. Those who have learned to fly higher than life’s challenges can reach are able to wait out the storm or find a new place to land where they can be contented. Meditation teaches us to be that person.

The reason why I wanted to create this book about mindfulness, meditation as well as motivation is because the life teachings are a part of the effect of meditation. I feel it would be anemic to simply write about mindfulness and meditation and stop there.

Once you have become a person who is enlightened, conscious and aware, I believe the next step would be to learn to use the methods in a practical sense in your daily life. I believe that you have the power and ability to create an environment that you want to live in and step into it. I also believe that your mindful awareness of your present moment gives you the ability to guide others whose lives are a scrambled jumble of occurrences that pull them this way or that way. While they will never admit it, their lives are an aimless confused journey like a ship without a rudder. They “take it as it comes and roll with the punches.” People accept what life happens to be for them, maybe you were the same way. Millions of people handle their life challenges with a trip to the doctor. Whether to fix what is broken on them due to their high stress lifestyles or job situations or to get

medication to calm them down. Several reports show that as many as 85% of people in the United States are on some sort of medication for stress, anxiety, depression or related mental conditions. A friend of mine here in Peru who is a psychologist told me that he number one complaint that she hears from her clients is that they suffer from depression. Most will be prescribed medicine because the time, patience and discipline to learn meditation is not the quick fix that they are seeking. Quick may be easy but it may not be as effective as a more focused path.

Consider the power of prevention. If you have a car, is it wiser to change the oil every three thousand miles or replace the entire engine when it seizes up because you neglected to change the oil? A $40 oil change versus a $6000 new engine.

Prevention is also a good idea in our daily lives as well, wouldn’t you agree? We don’t want to begin to seek out the benefits of meditation the day we get fired or the spouse walks out on us. That is closing the barn door after the horse got out.

The consistent benefits of a daily meditation practice is our preventive maintenance to stay balanced, in control of our emotions with a steady stream of those feel good chemicals our brain produces. When life deals us a bad hand we play the cards we are dealt and wait for a better hand next time. We learn to flow with the situation and practice non-resistance unless the situation absolutely requires it such as a physical attack or violation to our safety. We begin to understand that most things that people stress out about never actually happen. The trauma was inside their heads. Imagine the serious issues that we read about in the news. A school shooting, domestic violence, a rise in drug and alcohol related deaths whether by suicide or accident.

Forty five percent of the deaths by men under age forty five in the United States are a result of suicide. Prevention, a new way to cope and deal with life is available. In an earlier book that I published called “Infringe Me? A Solution To Consider For Gun Violence in America”, I wrote about the tragedy of tens of thousands of gun deaths every year in the United States. Recognizing the embroiled American public in their polarized debates to ensure that gun ownership is a Constitutional right against the public safety issue that is created by so many guns in the hands of private citizens, I

took a third position. The government could outlaw guns but there would be no guarantee people would comply willingly and criminals could never be expected to obey the law. Guns are here to stay. However guns do not shoot people without the human element attached to them. Aside from police acting in the line of duty, a homeowner protecting their family from an intruder or other lawful self defense circumstances there is no other reason for someone to shoot another person.

Those justifiable reasons amount to a mere fraction with the rest being criminal, impulse, psychopathic acts, domestic violence, road rage or suicides. People whose emotions and frustration, anger issues or mental conditions were out of control and became violent causing tragic deaths. Prevention could be the key to resolve many and I dare say, most of these incidents. The threat of jail is no deterrent to someone who doesn’t think they will ever be caught. A person not thinking clearly, out of control, with a gun in their hand is a disaster going somewhere to happen. If mindfulness, meditation practices were offered and practiced with consistency, the broader population’s mindset would never get to that level of rage and consequence. In some inner city schools, meditation is taught and practiced daily.

Some meditation groups offer their services in prisons as well.

Could it be that simple? Could lives be saved without the necessity for years of therapy, mind-numbing medications and expensive rehabilitation stays? I believe that it is a choice society must consider because I believe we have no other alternatives except for negative ones. Therapy and medical intervention has its place, and under certain circumstances is valuable. However I feel that society is trying to put out the fire by spraying water at the smoke. Rebuilding the house after it is in ashes is far less effective than being aware of the dangers and taking measures to prevent them in the first place. How to manage ourselves emotionally and effectively was never taught in school or in social programs growing up but imagine if it was taught. Coping methods could turn around decades of violence.

While gun violence is an extreme example of mental conditions going off the charts, we must recognize that every one of us have issues that pop up often or occasionally. If you think about it, they rarely give you advance warning, instead

problems just leap out into your day and derail you. Having a mind that is in a state of peace and tranquility throughout the day won’t prevent the pending problem but it will keep you in a place of calm and control so that you can deal with it without freaking out about it. You are more likely to be looking for solutions and resources to manage the issue than to hype the situation into hysteria. You become a problem solver, the go-to person because people know you can handle anything.

This is why I teach, practice and share methods for meditation as a lifestyle and as part of my daily morning routine. Like you, I have no idea what may happen in the course of my day but I am prepared, optimistic, I feel a sense of inner peace throughout my day so if and when the ut-ohs step into my path, I am better suited to flow past it, over it, around it or under it but one thing I know, whatever it is will not change me. With this confidence, life continues on my own terms. I win. You also can utilize the power available to you to be aware and prepared for whatever comes your way. Whatever it may be, positive or negative, by being in a state of mindfulness, aware and unsurprised, never ambushed nor shocked, which allows you to handle the day on your terms. The flow of endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin and dopamine is continual throughout the day because you induced them through meditation in the morning session.

Is it possible to have a great day every day? It sure is and starts as soon as you decide you want to replace the “Same old, same old� with a new experience and become closer to the person you always dreamed of being. It is completely within your control and once you continue, with consistency, no one can ever take it away from you. We are all creations of our habits. Our lives are molded by what we think about all day and what we value. Remember, there is no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing.

Sometimes Life Gets In The Way

Guess what? Life is a busy happening that everybody seems to be in a hurry to get somewhere. Sometimes we are busy being busy. Consider your job. Think about how much actual time you spend doing real and productive work. I have met very few myself, in fact, probably none that spend an entire eight hours getting things done. Carve out the lunch hour and the bathroom breaks, who actually is working the rest of the time? It sure wasn’t me when I was working for a company. Was it you? This is not a criticism of your work habits, just an observation. How is it then that we never seem to have enough time? Why do we seem to be late, lagging behind and somehow we are exhausted? If we were as busy as we would like to believe ourselves to be, our productivity would be astronomical. We would all be top producers in whatever field we work in. If there were accolades we would certainly be winning them all. It sure seems like we were busy all day long.

Mindfulness, the simple method of being aware in the here and now, helps us to be productive whether we work from home, in a factory or in an office. As our minds drift away toward distractions, idle gossip with a co-worker, daydreaming

about past events or imaginations of some future plan, or as is commonplace these days, scrolling texts on your phone the time we have on our jobs and in our lives somehow gets filled. It gets exhausting after a while trying to keep up with our scrambling monkey minds. We wish we had more time with our children. We wanted to meet up with friends over the weekend. We promised our significant other to get through a list of chores that would only take a few hours. Our personal discipline however vaporizes and we seem to never have quite enough time to get to it all. Mindfulness practice, meditation, helps us to develop the mind that we control instead of our minds running away in any and every direction. I refer to this as “Life just getting in the way.” Life gets in the way of us living a life on our own terms. I talk with people who “Didn’t have time to meditate” and ask them how they became so busy that early in the morning. In reality, we seem to have time for everything we consider a priority. Things are priorities if they have consequences attached to them. Things also are priorities if we feel such a pleasant reward for doing them that we look forward to doing them. For me, meditation is pure bliss and I look forward to it the first thing in the morning. It sets my day, centers me so that whatever else I need to be doing that day will be productive and completed because I have quelled the monkey mind. I have swept aside the squirrely thoughts of the past and the emotions that they create. I also push aside the future because I am focused on my now. Had I known about mindfulness and meditation’s benefits thirty years ago I can’t begin to imagine how much more progress and success I would have enjoyed in my life. I am here and now however and my time is a tool I guard carefully and use wisely.

Life will get in the way of all of your plans and somehow we feel that busy equates to progress. We fool ourselves to believe we are more efficient and productive, than we actually are. When everyone around us is doing the same thing, we consider “placeholder lives” as normal.

Mindfulness/meditations gives us our lives back. Our clear thinking and raised awareness makes every challenge find a solution. We find the help we need and become resourceful if we don’t have the resources at our fingertips. With a more

productive life we gain a sense of confidence and a deeper sense of our own selfworth. Life starts to take shape into the way we always wanted it to be. Of course we need down time. We need time to reset and refresh ourselves. We deserve those times and we can enjoy them more because we have been creative, productive and even inspiring. It took me a long time to understand the balance of working toward a set goal, achieving it and down time to just have fun and recover. In the last ten years, following this progressive method, I believe I have gotten more accomplished than the twenty years before.

Mindfulness/meditation literally hands you the tools you need to be your best self in any situation. You will make mistakes because it is how we learn. No one alive always knew everything. However we make fewer mistakes, answers seem to leap out at us and things no longer get over looked. Quite a boost just from a few minutes dedicated for meditation in the morning isn’t it? This shift in your mentality makes what used to be disappointments into experiences to learn how to be better at whatever task you are doing. You learn to stop beating yourself up over what will become trivial issues. Everybody makes mistakes, it was just your turn, that’s all. You tend to excuse other people’s mistakes too. Back up and try again. When you read about amazingly successful sports figures, who pushed their physical limits to the outer edge of performance, you learn how many times they missed a basket shot. How many times they struck out. How many times they got knocked down by superior athletes. What they wanted to accomplish was on the other side of those early defeats. It meant so much to them that nothing was going to stop them and nothing did. The best of the best still fail. Remember that you will only be remembered for you successes, victories and wins. Nobody remembers your failures. Your perceived failures will fade in your dimming memory.

When I created Changes for New Hope here in the Peruvian Andes, I kept a journal and wrote in it most every day. I still do. I probably failed more often than I succeeded in the beginning. Only in retrospect did I realize where I should have pressed on and where I should have retreated. There was no book, no manual to

guide me because what I was doing was a unique project for disadvantaged and troubled children that nobody wanted to engage with. I counted the successes one by one. I celebrated my accomplishments and built upon those. Only when I reread those earlier journals did I realize the pending disasters that awaited me. I learned to see stumbling blocks as something to climb over and turn into stepping stones. My goal was too compelling to get bogged down with disappointment and defeat. I wrote an article for an online magazine entitled, “My Failures Don’t Embarrass Me, But Here Is What Does.” I wrote that failures only manifest that there was significant effort to accomplish goals. I was only embarrassed by the fact that I had not failed more often. I could have learned even more. I hope that you will let this mean something valuable to you. Never let life get in your way. It is just another way of making an excuse.

This is a short story that makes the point I’d like to share. A man goes to his neighbor’s house and knocks on the door. His neighbor answers and asked what he could do for him. “Well, the grass in my yard is getting a little high so I’d appreciate if you could let me borrow your lawn mower.” The neighbor said, “I’m real sorry but I can’t loan you my lawnmower because today I am wearing grey socks.” Confused the neighbor asked, “I don’t understand, what does wearing grey socks have to do with me borrowing your lawn mower?” The man replied, “Nothing really, but if I don’t want to loan you my lawn mower, one excuse is just as good as another.”

The bottom line is that every excuse can be boiled down to just four words which are, I don’t want to. We find time to do what we want to do. We find the money to buy what we want to have. Our lives are to lived on our own terms and that calls for a gentle but consistent self-discipline. Self-discipline becomes a habit and a habit becomes a lifestyle. You deserve the best and this is a path to that life.

Dealing with Depression

Let me launch this chapter by reminding you that I am neither a medical doctor nor a mental health professional. If you happen to be under the care of one, follow their advice. Nothing I share here is a replacement to professional care of trained and certified individuals. What I offer here is personal observation and experience and how mindfulness and meditation has helped me. Some of the physical exercises have been major breakthroughs for me and those who also practiced them have found value in it. If you find yourself feeling better using them, share your experience with your medical care provider and again, follow their recommendation.

Why am I including a chapter about depression in a book teaching mindfulness and meditation? It is because depression and anxiety seems to be one of the biggest and most invasive emotions in our lives. People that commit suicide are not necessarily clinically insane. They feel lost, hopeless and depressed.

Literally billions of dollars are spent each year on anti-depression medication.

Medications have side effects that one accepts as a trade-off for the benefits of the meds.

What if there was another method of overcoming the demons of depression?

You see, depression is the feeling, the manifestations of depression may surface as inability to get out of bed, go to work or do a proper job once you do get to your job. Your relationships are ruined, a spouse or significant other may feel the weight of your depression upon their shoulders. How long can they hold you up as well as their own personal struggles? You may feel suicidal, death being preferred over feeling terrible every day. You know in your mind that no one understands, no one can begin to comprehend the powerlessness and drained feeling that you are enduring. They can’t see it, feel it, therefore they can’t know it. You are alone, unable to cope, hell, you don’t even feel up to breathing. Your muscles weigh a ton and getting out of a chair in your darkened room is asking for the world. They may as well be asking you to go run a marathon with them. Smiling is a task that you simply can’t even attempt.

You feel hollow, food doesn’t taste like much more than mush, you find no enjoyment from anything at all. Television is just a time waster that fills the void of hours and sleep, when you can sleep is the only hint of comfort you feel. Anyone telling you to “Snap out of it” is only underscoring the fact that they don’t have the first damn clue about what you are going through. They seem to be on another planet and you wish they would stay there. Depression is the harmful art of doing absolutely nothing.

How do I know so much about depression? How do I know the difference between a bad day and deep depression? What makes me an “expert?” Guess what? I get to be human too. I may be enlightened today but do you think I always was? Where I am today is a mile marker to where I came from. I spent most of my life battling depression.

Today, it is a deep ocean in front of me that I no longer fear because I know how to swim. But it is always present and ready to drown me. In my early years it was undiagnosed and medical science was fairly primitive, in my opinion, in trying to treat depression. Seasonal Affected Disorder Syndrome or S.A.D.S. is a condition where people get depressed when the seasons change from fall to

winter. Days get shorter and nights get longer. There is less sunlight and people get sad, depressed people seem to hibernate, feeling listless and a heavy blanket of sadness covers them for months. That was my first indication I was suffering from depression.

Everybody has sad days or circumstances that makes you depressed for a while but usually people pull up and out of it and move on. A heart wrenching breakup, the sudden loss of a job, financial struggles, anything that might shatter your sense of routine and normality. We all have gone through them. Few want to kill themselves or do harm to themselves. There are other jobs, other girlfriends or boyfriends and as things change for the worst we also know things can and usually change for the best as well. Depressed people know it is the end of the world. People tend to drift away from them because they are such a downer to be around. Depressed people feel it, and sink lower into their personal dark abyss with nothing to look forward to except pain.

How did I come out of my personal hell and torment? Action is the first step toward a solution. Literally do the opposite of what depression forces you to do. You definitely will not want to, but it is that or die, given the option, I think I would want to live. Get up, take a shower, get dressed, self-care. I listened to YouTube videos about depression, motivation, taking control. Those videos were all saying to start a habit of meditating. They talked about focusing on this moment, not even this day but this current moment. This began a practice of mindfulness. What was I depressed about? All my expectations of a project that I had dedicated myself totally to was shaken, threatened, and rattled to its core. People made, what turned out to be, false promises to me. People were cruel, inconsiderate and cold. Resources had vanished and close people I had trusted betrayed that trust. Then my father died suddenly and unexpectedly.

That event was compounded because I was financially unable to catch a flight to be there for the funeral with my family. If things could have possibly gone wrong, they went wrong, in spades. There was no Calvary to come riding over the hill blowing their bugle and chase away the bad, negative situation. I was

on my own. I sat for days, then months alone in a small room where I lived.

That one room was my entire living space. I ate every few days though I wasn’t hungry, I went from my mattress that was propped up on a few wooden fruit crates to a wicker chair and stared at the wall in front of me, motionless. I didn’t answer phone calls, did not want visitors and did not go out. If you painted me white, I could have passed for a statue. My frustration was multiplied because I knew I was not going to hurt myself or commit suicide so my days just stretched into weeks then months.

So, on my laptop I pulled up a few motivational videos. I looked for and found more and listened to them too. I also listened to upbeat music, though I was not in the mood for it. Then I tried to practice a few of the exercises they recommended. Focus on right here and now. The past is gone, including my Dad and there was nothing I was going to do to change that. The future was beyond my grasp so why even think about that right now? The past and future were a poison to me at that point. Right here and now, that is all I had to deal with and though it might be pretty ugly right now, it is mine and I had to manage it somehow. It is my hole to climb out of, if I cared to. Many people stay in a state of depression because they just don’t know how to creep out of it. As hard as it can be, knowing how is a huge help to begin the journey.

I had to recognize that I was in a state of depression, which was separate from who I was. Depression and anxiety are diseases, like the flu or a cold and will pass. No one is a cold, they have a cold, no one is depression they have depression. That was the first awareness to break the chain. To this day if a mental hiccup floats into my mind I say to myself, out loud, this is anxiety or depression, I am not the depression or anxiety. I do not have to react to it.

Next, I got up, literally standing up after months not moving more than a few feet from bed to chair and back. Though that may sound like a no-brainer, anyone could do it task, for a person dealing with circumstances that have been overwhelming for months prior, it took all my strength and what energy I

could muster. I opened the curtains that I had closed months earlier and saw the sun was shining. Children were playing in the street and people were scurrying about their daily routines seemingly without a care in the world.

Clouds gently passed across the horizon. I opened the window and felt a slight breeze touch my face. The next step was going to be hard. I smiled.

People struggling with depression need to force a smile onto their faces because your brain gets a signal from the body’s movements what it is supposed to respond to. This is also based in science. I had read where patients dealing with severe depression in institutions were taken to windows and made to look into the sunshine of the day and smile. It was absolutely fake, forced and insincere but I did it anyway. It felt like I was in a projection room in a theatre and the smile was projected onto a screen, just an image with no emotion, no actually reason to smile, just a mechanical act. It was the longest ten minutes of my life. I followed the instructions that I heard on the videos and from things I had read in the past. It worked for others so it had to work for me. Everything was forced requiring huge efforts from me. The sun on my face, the slight gentle breeze, standing up and moving around more than I had in months, all felt unusual but it all felt good. Perhaps good is too strong of a word but I felt better. I raised my arms wide open to embrace the sunlight and world out there. Depressed people curl up, fold and shrink. Making those movements reinforce in our brain that you are depressed and coming up and out of it requires physical expression contrary to the emotion.

If depression caused me to sit motionless, the opposite was to move. It literally felt like I had to remember how to walk, what muscles and joints to move in a coordinated effort. It felt like I was a marionette on strings walking for the first time. Movement was necessary, it was the opposite of sitting. I resorted back to my martial arts exercises to begin with. They were locked into my muscle memory after practicing each move literally thousands of times. I started at my head, then to my neck, down to my shoulders, my back and abdomen, pelvic muscles and thighs, knees and calf muscles and finally my feet. I thought about

the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz getting oiled after years standing in a rusted pose before Dorothy and the Straw Man arrived. It was not easy and it didn’t make me happy. It was only with great effort emotionally and physically to do it. Then, though I absolutely wanted to sit back down in my chair, I resisted and went for a walk outside. For those who never had to deal with deep crippling depression, this may sound like a ridiculously infantile feat. For those who are reading this book after being in or currently enduring depression, you can relate and identify with how I felt back then. I tell you this story because it was a profound experience for me to be in that state of depression and it was profound to get out of it. Mindfulness and meditation and later motivation saved me from unknown misery that would have followed if I had not begun my practice and continuing it. Far be it from me to share the solutions found in mindfulness and meditation without also sharing my own frailties and why those solutions were important to me. Like I said, I get to be human too. If I can do it, then I know that you can do it too.

The next step was listening to comforting soft voices that reminded me that I was a valuable person in the Universe. All good things were mine to reach out and embrace. I may be completely alone, yet I was embraced by a loving Universal energy that created all things and is in all things, surrounding all things and joins all things. That means me too! Guided meditation brought me to places I was only able to visit in my colorful imagination but I learned that the imagination of an experience and actually being there is the same in your mind. The brain cannot differentiate between real and imagined situations whether they are good or bad experiences. So every morning I was in a Caribbean paradise, swimming in crystal blue water that was warm and beautiful as I watched the multi-colored, shimmering fish swimming curiously past me. The reefs were a mixture of blue, green, red, purple and orange reaching out in various directions. The sunlight made the coral brilliant and so alive as I swam over them. The sand was pure white powder and the sun was warm on me as I emerged heavily from the surf and ran down the beach,

feeling the sand crunch under my bare feet. The air smelled slightly salty and the sound of the relentless churning of wave after wave crashed against the white sand before it drifted back into the ocean itself. It was as real in my thoughts as it was when I was there with my son almost thirty years earlier.

Your brain cannot focus and think about two opposing feelings at the same time. Love and hate, jealousy and trust, pain and pleasure. It has to be one or the other. Depression was fading and pleasure of movement, guided imagery in my head, smiling into the sunlight standing at my window replaced the hollowness and heaviness of what I had endured for months before.

Without one pill or clinic visit, I was able to emerge from a suffocating condition that was paralyzing me. I decided I would look for one, just one thing outside that would make me smile. I went for a walk into the park nearby the house. I reached out and touched the leaves on the trees lining the walkway. I pulled up a small handful of grass and smelled it. I remembered how much I enjoyed cutting the common backyards behind my house and my neighbor’s houses back in Baltimore. I cut the same all at the same time to make it look even but also because I loved the smell of fresh cut grass. I saw a hummingbird, common in the Andes, silently zipping from flower to flower. Flowers lined the walkway and smelled fresh and fragrant which was forgotten to me because of my self-cloistering for so many months. I looked up into the blue sky and watched the cloud formations swirl in a dozen shades of grey, passing each other and overlapping at varying altitudes, indicating a soon coming rainstorm.

I thought it looked like poetry in motion. I replayed the music in my head that I heard back in my room. The enjoyment of life was starting to replace the feeling of loss, sadness and despair. Though nothing was going to bring my dad back, nor could I change the attitudes of cruelty and apathy that had recently caused me so much grief. All I had was this moment, this now, this time among the nature in the park so it had to be enough. It was in fact simple yet memorable and represented the ladder that I would use to start my climb up and out, re-emerging into the real world that needed me.

Mindfulness and meditation practices will not make everything right in the world every day for you, that just isn’t how life works. However the daily practice and focus on mindfulness, observing your present, will raise you above the pettiness of life’s challenges making the issues shrink in your perception of them. What used to be the “End of the World” disaster now becomes a nuisance that you need to step around so it can no longer impede your progress because, you have important life stuff to accomplish. You learn what matters and what doesn’t and you act accordingly. It becomes easier with daily practice and remaining faithful to your progress and development. Depression is a winnable battle and I am with you in it, let’s win together.

Letting Go Of Stress

We all have to deal with stressful situations from time to time. Many focus on relieving and eliminating stress and wonder why they still are plagued by the effects of stress. I like to always back up a step and see where it came from. Too often we are stuck in The Moment. Ask yourself why you are stressed. What

led to the point where your emotions are flaring up and you want to react?

Under the right trigger moments we all have a breaking point. How did we allow ourselves get to that level though?

Without detailing every possibility, I found that ego has a lot, if not everything, to do with conflicts. Zen philosophy teaches that when we attach ourselves to something emotionally, any threat to that attachment will create a stressful situation. Have you ever seen someone in a minor fender bender car accident get out of their car and absolutely lose their minds? Have you seen your boss at work at the end of the month if the expected results were not reached?

Have you ever encountered a spouse who just had the world collapse on them just before you arrived home? People who are attached to their possessions, their titles or positions or their unrealistic expectations of how things “should” be going are setting themselves up for disaster. It’s like an accident going somewhere to happen. They simply explode on the closest nearest and most convenient target for their rage. Does that every help? Never does, does it?

Why not? It is because the rage is internal. It is because their adrenaline and cortisol flow in their bloodstream at that moment has already caused their stomach to tighten, their pupils to dilate, their heart is racing, their muscles contract, their mind bursts into a survival mode and there is no place to run to, there is no one to fight and no way to immediately discharge their emotions. In the modern world where saber tooth tigers are no longer the threat that our primal instincts were designed for, all there is for someone stressed out to do is verbally lash out. Those who are not afraid of legal consequences may become physical. Domestic violence, bar fights, road rage incidents, street attacks, vandalism, sexual assaults, bullying or self-harm may be the result.

Meditation in the mornings set our emotional state so that stressing circumstances, while inevitable, become manageable. We learn to discharge out negative emotions as they rise up before they take us over. I have decided that I will not allow myself to get mad and upset at situations that I cannot control. If I can manage the situation myself, I will. If I can’t, getting upset isn’t

going to make it any better. Unless I am faced with physical danger, everything can be worked out or dropped from my plans. How often have you been faced with life or death actual danger? Not potentially, but face to face, knife to your throat, gun to your head, car went over the cliff, actual danger? Unless you are reading this in a foxhole of a war zone or a prison cell with a price on your head, you probably will admit it was rare if ever. People tend to catastrophize circumstances in their heads as a survival mode mechanism. If we see it as worse than it is and we are prepared for it, we consider that much better than if we went into a situation unprepared and were blindsided. I spent years, many years so hyper-vigilant and ready for anything at any time that I cheated myself out of a calm, unstressed, happy life in many social settings. I don’t allow myself to live like that anymore. I still find myself aware of my surroundings, I sit with my back to the wall, facing the door wherever I go but that is more out of habit these days than when it used to be a matter of survival. Letting go of your imaginations of doom, pending disasters and your personal apocalyptic end of the world thinking is not just a matter of releasing it. Careful steps to discharge the deep stressors from your thinking is possible.

Let me share with you a stressful situation that I recently encountered. How I dealt with it was far different than how I would have crumbled under it years ago. I was returning to Peru after visiting family in Maryland. Since 9/11, life has never been the same, particularly at airports. Airport security seems to be a cross between Mussolini’s Black Shirts and near laughable, bumbling, incompetent department store security guards. Everybody complies with their commands because no one wants to get held up any longer than absolutely necessary. Unless you are transporting contraband, you tolerate their bored rudeness and smile on through it all. I am amazed when I see people outraged that their hands are wiped and tested for explosive material or that they need to stand in a tube to be scanned for weapons then patted down like common criminals. It’s the price for security in the 21 st century, just roll through it and let the people do their jobs.

I sat on a runway for three hours waiting for a first aid kit to be returned which held up the flight. At six feet two inches tall, the seats in coach class seemed to shrink with each passing hour, and we weren’t yet even airborne yet. In Miami, we arrived late of course, and my connecting flight had left long before we arrived. The only attempt to inform the passengers when the next flight would take us to our destination was on the flight board overhead. “Delayed until 10:30 am.” The next morning. It was 9:30 pm. I found someone from the airline on their phone and after their call was finished, they told me to go downstairs to meet with a representative who will be arranging our overnight accommodations and transportation to the hotel. I went downstairs to an empty area, no representative, nothing. A security guard came by conveniently so I asked him about the situation for the airline I was to connect with and where this mysterious airline support person was. He told me I would have to go to the other end of the airport to ask a representative there what to do. I explained that I just came from there and they said to come to where we were standing. “Maybe they are upstairs.” He had no clue and was clearly saying anything to get me out of his face. I was toting a heavy backpack, I had been sitting on a cramped plane seat three extra hours than necessary and a security guard telling me anything that came to mind, knowing it was no answer at all, was not what I wanted to hear. “Ok, let’s go there together, that way we will both know the situation for the next people coming in behind me.” I said. “I’m sorry, I have no idea what to tell you, I’m new here, I just started yesterday.” was his response.

Could I have flipped out? Sure, but why? “Thank you, I’ll find help somewhere on my own.” No need to complicate an already stressful night. Sure I was stressed out but managing that stress was the key here. I wandered around aimlessly until I actually found an obscure alcove with a line of people that I recognized from the flight. They were in one line to get tickets for the next morning’s flight and then had to get into a parallel line immediately after that for vouchers for the hotel and restaurant that was to put us up for the night. To

say that people were upset, tired, bored, outraged, stressed beyond words because there was no communication, no representatives to explain anything to these stranded passengers would be an understatement. The two agents that were taking the brunt of the abuse were close to tears. By time I got in front of the man, he was ready for my rage. “We will get there tomorrow instead of tonight, it isn’t your fault, it isn’t your airline sir, whatever you have to do to make that happen, I am grateful.” If I can be a small ray of kindness for this guy and his co-worker, good. He thanked me for my patience. I simply used my breathing exercises, become mindful. I was in an uncontrollable situation.

Nothing I was going to do or say was going to make it change. I could only control myself, my responses, my emotional state so I did not make a bad situation worse. Children were crying, parents were arguing with each other, university students on their now shortened breaks were becoming verbally abusive and sarcastic. It was like a spark becoming a bonfire which was becoming a raging inferno. Why? It is because people were attached to their expectations, emergencies were not in the equation. Generally people are rigid and inflexible. Who suffers from that? Having an intolerant attitude is like wetting your pants, no one is going to feel it but them. I pulled out my small bag of magic tricks and started entertaining the crying children. Then the parents got involved and soon a small crowd surrounded me and were temporarily distracted from their misery. It felt good emotionally to be able to bring a little relief from a “crisis” which I considered an inconvenience but it was hardly being marched off to a prison camp somewhere. Physically, I was exhausted, hardly able to see straight and hungry. We were told to wait outside for a shuttle bus that would take us to the hotel, which never came. A few of us flagged a taxi on our own. The driver, who wouldn’t use his meter, charged us an outrageous price until we said it seemed unreasonable and he immediately dropped it by five dollars. The next line at the hotel front desk was filled with three flights that were all delayed until the morning. The vouchers for the restaurant were useless because the restaurant closed hours earlier. We were

given a cookie, literally, a large chocolate chip cookie and told the restaurant would be open for breakfast at six which by this time was only five hours later.

It was one o’clock in the morning. Have you ever been so tired that you couldn’t sleep? I entered my luxurious room, laid down in a cloud for a bed and couldn’t sleep, in part because I was afraid of oversleeping and miss one of the two shuttles that were to take several hundred of us to the airport for the morning flight out.

Things happen beyond our control, things we don’t like, it throws our plans off and inconveniences us and we are outside of our comfort zone. I read in the Tao Te Ching about practicing non-resistance. It is a practice because you will have many different situations that require your attention to your goal of being stress relieving and not stress escalating. Your responses need to be different for many different circumstances so practicing each time, using calming words, doing calming actions is what is going to make you a master of the day and of yourself. When resistance comes uninvited you need to learn how to manage yourself first and then the situation or individual as well.

I believe I will always be practicing. My simple breathing exercises, muscle tension relaxation techniques and guided imagery in my mind have served me well in many impossible happenstances. My life here in Peru is filled with service providers that do not provide service. Someone without the skills I am writing about would stay in a constant state of frustrated hysteria. In a typical day it is not uncommon to walk to the market to buy a kilo of fruit and get shorted by a few hundred grams, if you aren’t watching the scale. I usually walk there because I like the exercise and also taxi drivers are notorious for overcharging gringos. The sidewalks are narrow and people do not move to one side as I shift to the other side. Instead people smack shoulders as they pass you. Red lights and stop signs are rarely obeyed and walking across a street assuming the cars will stop is a mistake. Restaurant workers have sanitation practices that would make a hog sick. If you ask for milk for your coffee you might get it by Tuesday. And the stories go on and on like that. I

have hosted tourists who have volunteered with my project and many have been so enraged and upset that they had to go home weeks earlier than planned. Meanwhile, those of us who have learned the art of flowing through and past nuisances seem to live quite well in peace and contentment. I have learned to almost float past people who won’t move around me, walk out of restaurants that are filthy, anticipate taxis to be homicidal and make sure I have exact change because no one has change in stores anywhere. I make sure I watch postal clerks put stamps on my mail before I leave the post office because otherwise my mail would never arrive and the clerk would pocket my money.

I smile, not that anything is humorous but at my own response to such difficult occurrences which used to upset me and now I feel like it is just part of the overall adventure that Peru has become for me. I could not change people all around me but my own personal attitude changes that I could make was just as effective and beneficial to me. Waiting for the world to change around you, as badly as change is needed, would be like waiting for a mountain to erode. I believe that miserable people are a punishment to themselves, I also believe equally so, that people who decide that the world is a journey, an adventure and whatever happens in it is part of the Universal lesson that we can learn from and become our very best selves even in impossible situations. I do not feel that we are being punished by the Fates or some celestial entity, or that “Life sucks.� I have endured what I believed at the time to be insurmountable circumstances and if there was such a thing as luck, I was definitely born under a black cloud. I learned to climb on top of those stumbling blocks and turn them into stepping stones. I can and you can too.

Forgiveness. Probably one of the hardest lessons to learn in life is how to forgive. There are endless lists of sadistic, miserable seething bastards that I would have taken great pleasure in watching them receive what they deeply deserved and it distressed me to no end to watch them rewarded for their deliberate and cruel acts toward innocent people as well as me. Today they

simply have my deepest pity and sympathy for the wreck their lives had become and the fact that, while I only had to endure them for the time I did, they have to live with themselves every single minute of every single day.

Whatever mask they portray to the world, they know who and what they are and the obvious pain they must be suffering to be that individual. So, I forgive them. Lily Tomlin once famously said. “Forgiveness is giving up all hope to have a better past.” The best to do with the past is leave it there.

As I became enlightened and practiced my non-resistance through meditation and mindfulness, the need to feel slighted, used, abused, cheated and maligned just didn’t seem important anymore. I was wronged, victimized and taken advantage of too many times to count. Guess what? So have you and so has every person that ever walked the face of the earth. What if we all carried around our hurt and spent the rest of our lives licking our wounds, telling our stories of woe to anyone who would listen? That would make for a pretty miserable world wouldn’t it? Many people allow their wounds and sorrows to define them. “I will never trust anyone in matters of love again!” “The next thug that tries to rob me I will rip out their throat with my bare fingernails.” “If I can catch up to that son of a bitch that cut me off I will run him off the road.”

Does any of that sound familiar? Do you know who those people become?

Jaded, old, lonely people who can never love again. They become defendants in courts fighting for their freedom. They become wheelchair bound individuals that did catch up to that son of a bitch but didn’t count on them having a gun.

What and if we learned, practiced and demonstrated an attitude of forgiveness? Not because they deserve it, not because they ever asked for it, but because it is who we are. Enlightened, trying to become an A+ person in a miserable D- set of circumstances. It is because we want to be free of the weight on their evil that has lived too long in our memory and mind. Let them go and by doing so you let yourself and your attachment to them go as well.

In my early days working my first job in a sewage plant, I encountered some miserable, cruel and apparently pained people. They took out their pain on pretty much anybody they got near. It was so bad that the municipal government sent several to a mental health clinic and paid for it because they were becoming a danger to others as well as themselves. I carried around my resentment of their viciousness toward me for years. I forget nothing.

Somehow I felt that forgetting, forgiving would be unjustly letting them go free.

I needed to remember them so no one like them would ever have a chance to treat me the way they did ever again. If I heard words that were similar to the expressions they used, I was triggered and my fight or flight mode was activated. Many years later, after the advent of the internet I Googled some of their names. Imagine how silly I felt being angry and resentful about these miscreants when I saw they had died decades earlier. Here I was all upset still, carrying around this anger and they were laying dead in the ground somewhere. It was at that moment that I began to realize the uselessness of holding it in any longer. Others I looked up were back in prison or their addictions to drugs and alcohol had ravaged the last several decades of their lives. People are punishing themselves, their own misery and pain brought it upon them. I was determined not end up like them and allow my own pain, wounds, that should have long ago been forgotten, to eat away at my today, my Now and my daily happiness. Stress actually shortens your life, the adrenaline and cortisol breaks down your cells in your body and neutralizes your immune system, allowing viruses, bacteria and malfunction of your organs to occur. That is not going to be my life nor my future and I can bet it isn’t going to be yours either.

Imagine all the divorces, broken homes, the lawsuits, the families that won’t talk to each other, the number of alcohol and drug addictions that happen because we have yet learned the value of forgiveness. Egos take control, people are so in love with being right that they will lose everything for the privilege. It is getting worse all the time. People are so delicate, so overly

sensitive to any wrongly spoken word or deed that they are eager to leap upon it instead of shrugging it off and going on their otherwise good day. No one seems to ask, “Is this worth the argument?” Why is conflict and confrontation the immediate go-to when we hear or see something we don’t like. I don’t know any poor lawyers, do you? They all seems to be busy fighting the wrongs of the world for people willing to spend hundreds of dollars per hour to show someone else just how wrong they were. Cardiologists will tell you that stress is the reason many of their patients arrive in their offices or in intensive care units in hospitals.

Would you be willing to allow a shift of consciousness and a morning meditation habit to relieve you of the draining effects of anger, resentment and personal neglect to your wellbeing? I personally know people who wish they had made different decisions in their lives and instead of acting on their anger, their frustration and hatred. Our thoughts become our actions. What are actions but manifested thoughts? What is in someone’s heart you will hear coming out of their mouths and their actions will follow like night follows day.

An attitude of gratitude, allowing nuisances to float past you or if it confronts you, release your ego’s attachment to it, making the issue no longer important and flow onward to your best day possible. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was from someone I was bitterly complaining to about some imagined slight by a co-worker and I was beyond upset. He looked at me and simply said, “So what?” I had no answer. Today, thirty some odd years later I find myself seeing issues arising and ask myself that question, “So what?” If it can’t kill me and eat me, how much do I want to care? Forgive.

How Do You Know If Meditation Is Working?

When you begin a meditation practice your first impression is usually one of disappointment. It can be discouraging, not because meditation doesn’t work, but because we are so into the addiction of immediate results. We want to pay for the ticket and see the movie right now. We want to go to the park and get on the rides right away. We want to order our food at a restaurant and have in in front of us within quick minutes. We are accustomed to instant gratification.

If you don’t think so, look at where your phone is right now. What is one of the

first things you do every morning when you get up? Who called who texted or who sent you a photo overnight, am I right? The idea that meditation does not give immediate spectacular results might make you think that either you are not doing it right or that claims of its potency are hyped beyond reality. None of that is reality however.

Fifty years ago we understood that things took time. We accepted that as a way of life. Mail took a few days to arrive. People called you when they got to a phone that was mounted on the wall or on a desk. Instant did not exist.

Meditation is a process an inner personal development that has lifelong benefits and therefore it is not going to work as quickly as a pill that is itself only a temporary fix with plenty of side effects. Give yourself time and be patient to allow the flow of meditative benefits to fill your life.

Ironically, following your journey into meditation not only has powerful results but can be, in time, almost immediate every day. It requires you to be consistent in your practice every day. Preconceived ideas are one of the most dangerous toxins in our human experience. In relationships, in jobs we show up to everyday and in results we expect out of every experience, including meditation. You cannot force results any more than if you tried to force someone to love you. However, once love unfolds it is strong beyond description. You realize it was worth waiting for, right? This is no different.

Meditation is not an end of itself, or a means to an end. It simply is. I was initially frustrated reading the Tao Te Ching when it said that the Tao does nothing but leaves nothing undone. Then I understood and became one with it.

Meditation is the same, it isn’t supposed to “do” anything but it opens you to be able to do all things. When your blood pressure lowers, your immune system is strengthened, when your relationships seem to have fewer conflicts, when the work environment becomes more tolerable and even enjoyable, when sex becomes the glorious experience you have not had in many years, when friendships seem to be more engaging, when your mind becomes crystal

clear with new, innovative ideas and when you no longer seem to be worried about the future or resentful about the past, you will know that meditation is working.

I have written this book to incorporate motivation as the latter part so that you will be able to put to use the tools that meditation has provided you. Better said, that you have provided for yourself via your meditation practice. Some people envision some sort of monastic life in seclusion and solitude as a result of becoming at peace through meditation. If you are watching a lot of Kung Fu movies that may be the case. There are those guys sitting on a high mountain in Tibet doing nothing but living a life of meditative sacrifice and self-denial in orange robes walking slowly. But that is a rare individual and in a modern western culture, hardly practical. What I am teaching is a life in the world that you currently inhabit as opposed to a cloistered seclusion. I want you to be able to apply the principles and values of the joy of embracing the world where it is and as it is with your expanded sense of freedom, joy and love. I want your compassion to so overwhelm your current environment that positive changes become inevitable. This is accomplished simply by being your best self. You are not a new convert to a religion ready to go drive everybody else nuts, or an insurance salesman trying to win a trip to Hawaii for selling the most policies in your office. You are not trying to get yourself ostracized nor are you trying to sequester yourself from everyday normal life. You have a new set of eyes to see and experience the world and you will always be in and part of that world. The good that the world has to offer as well as the tragedies and sorrows that also occur. Your enlightened response to your environment is what meditation has done for you. How your brain has transformed to be able to trigger the endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin and dopamine through your meditative practice so that you can mindfully focus on present challenges and enjoy happy times to the fullest is evidence, proof positive that meditation works.

Every person will find their own version of what happiness means to them.

Every person will realize just how personal meditation and mindfulness is as

they go through their daily lives and whatever they are experiencing, the consciousness of “I Am” becomes central, whatever the circumstances. For over 2500 years meditation has been a daily stable in the lives of literally millions of people and though only recently gaining popularity in the Western culture, its effectiveness has been undeniable. Meditation works because we flow in tandem with its source of grace and gentleness.

One of the most powerful aspects of meditation for me personally is that it has no “requirements.” It is not a structured religion so to speak. I do not need to wear any special clothing, chant any special words, sit in any special position, belong to any special group or follow any special code to be an effective meditator and sage to others who also want to learn how to gain the benefits of it. I am not a priest, guru, shaman, sensei or master. I refer to myself as I have for a decade as merely a sage. Sage, by definition means, “A good person.” All I am or ever hope to be is compassion in action, a value to the human family. By becoming No-Thing, I have opened myself to become all things. I am Jim Killon, an ordinary man who gives an extraordinary damn.

What I can share with you and others can live on forever, though my time on earth is reaching my final decades. The fact that I know my time is limited drives me to share all that I am able for as many lives as I can touch.

Does meditation work and how do you know? Observe what you are becoming, how your view of the world, of those around you, how your relationships are changing. Look at what you used to crave and what you no longer need to feel complete, happy, sexy, powerful or important. You will notice that less is more. You no longer attach yourself to things and possessions as a sense of accomplishment. You can have any kind of house you want to live in, drive whatever type of car you enjoy driving, vacation wherever you feel most content but you will realize you no longer care to “possess” things anymore. Things end up possessing you and drag you into the dregs of attachments again. You will find yourself looking for opportunities to share of yourself when and where you can with the less fortunate. You don’t need to

give everything away and live in destitution yourself, just sharing what you can, without fanfare and ego-enriching self-congratulating.

I made this mistake when I came to Peru by using everything I had to help the most disadvantaged of families in the Andes. Within five years everything I had was gone and I found myself among the destitute living on donations sent to me. At one point I was living on just two hundred dollars a month, sleeping in one small room eating one meal a day. It was a learning experience for me and I learned well. There is absolutely no value in setting yourself on fire to keep other people warm, that is just foolish. What did I know at the time? I was finding my own sense of center. I hope that saves some of you from having to learn the hard way. Benjamin Franklin said, “You cannot help the poor by becoming one of them.” I create an opportunity now, which does a lot more to help those in destitution that sacrificing my own food money to make sure others eat. I still feed the hungry, I clothe those who have few clothes but I do it out of my abundance and no longer take the clothes off my own back to clothe them. Most importantly now, I do not do humanitarian work for recognition or applause. I no longer need people to know what I do so they will donate to my project to keep it going. In fact my website at Changes for New Hope (www.changesfornewhope.com) specifically states that we do not ask for donations any longer. We encourage people to buy one of our books such as this one and the royalties are used to continue our programs. I just want to be a sage, a good person, and it seems to be enough and I stay consistent to my personal integrity. Important titles and a dollar will buy a cup of coffee.

You can know that meditation and mindfulness is working for you by the results of your life developments around you. As I have written here and in my other e-book, “Living Large Living Deliberately”, you are creating your environment and actually stepping into it. You watch negativity drop away from you. Toxic people seem to drift away from you. In some cases you need to excuse yourself from them because you have nothing in common with them anymore. Hate speech, misogynist jokes, rudeness and some other ugliness of

life, the egocentricities that drive so many people into criticisms and arguments just don’t appeal to you anymore. My friends stopped telling me racists jokes because they made me cringe, and soon they drifted away from me altogether. Though these guys had been my friends since high school, I never missed them. Hurting people, even in jest, just felt ugly to me. We become our environment, this was not the environment I preferred anymore, though I personally was never a racist. I preferred solitude and peace to tolerating what others talked about and did just because it was familiar.

Obviously that did not settle well with them. I was teased as being a gentry, a lover of other races, a Ghandi-esque person, and a white savior. I didn’t hear it for long because I separated myself from what I no longer cared to tolerate.

That was my journey, which was my choice. That is how I knew meditation was working for me. I had become a better quality of myself, not in comparison to anyone else. I became closer to the man I always wanted to become. I was grateful for that opportunity. At a seminar I learned, “If you were an albino, would you vacation in Florida in August? If you were allergic to cat fur would you hang out in pet shops?” As we transition into our more enlightened self, we seem to find ourselves walking in nature and meeting like-minded people.

Affirmations and Meditation

Affirmations are another piece of the puzzle that some folks use to attain their inner peace, raise self-esteem and also to reinforce their focus for the day.

Affirmations can be beneficial with consistency and I would not undermine their effectiveness. When I wake up every morning, my feet land on a soft alpaca rug and the words flow out of my mouth, “Thank you.” My reticular activating system (R.A.S.) turns on my brain to be prepared for what I choose to input into it. Thank you signals to my brain that I am grateful and my brain scans reasons why that is true.

A cloudy day is a beautiful swirl of clouds that is a ballet of movement in the sky. A dog barking outside is singing in his own special way. Dishes in the sink is my opportunity to make my wife’s morning a little easier as I do them for her. It is another way to show my love for her. The chilly Andean mountain air against my skin lets me know with its crispness that I am fully alive to feel the sensation of it. I used to hate all those things but now I see joy, love and gratitude in everything. I triggered my R.A.S. to the frequency of gratitude like a radio. As I mentioned earlier, your brain believes whatever you tell it regardless if it is true or not. It doesn’t matter if you tell it that the sky is green and Santa Claus is real, if you choose to believe it your brain will look for reasons why it is true and disregard whether or not it is true. Look at people who believe outlandish political, religious or social media information. They believed it, acted upon it and their lives became the condition they are as a result of it. Miserable people who seem to find the problem for every solution and the cloud in every silver lining have the same brain we do except they use it to reinforce their misery. The world is against them and they have proof even if they have to invent it. You are the master of your brain and of your thoughts and what you think about is what you attract.

The good news is that it works for positive affirmations as well. If I stand in front of the mirror in the morning and say, with confidence, that I am a special being, that I have everything I need to accomplish any task set before me today, that I am a loving person and I am worthy of being loved, I live an abundant life, my brain will make every effort to prove that. You can log onto YouTube and find unlimited videos ready made with affirmations for you.

There is a caveat that I want to make sure you are aware of. Like meditation, some folks get disappointed by their use of affirmations. The goal is to make you open to ideas, suggestions and opportunities that will serve you. I suggest being general and becoming more specific as you go. An affirmation to “Be happy today” is so open ended that it is like telling a waitress in a restaurant you would like food but not saying what food you want. Ambiguous

affirmations do not seem to do anything for you. That is one reason why you may find yourself disappointed. The other reason some are discouraged is because they get too specific and ask for things that would require the moving of mountains or the hijacking of someone else’s free will. “I want $100,000 to appear in my bank account from an, as yet and unknown source, by Friday, this Friday at lunchtime.” Ok, first, really? $100,000 by lunchtime Friday? From an unknown source? Why? I will say that you can believe that with “All Your Heart” and if I were a betting man, I am going to put my money on the fact that it won’t happen. What are you prepared to do to achieve that goal? Remember we are still in a material world and nothing replaces hard work and personal accomplishment. The money is possible, even probable but not by Friday at lunchtime and not from some mysterious unknown source. Even mega-lottery winners had a 1 in 17 million chance of winning and of the many millions of people who bought lottery tickets, only one person wins. You may receive an opportunity to work on that will eventually produce results of $100,000 but having it fall out of the sky will end up in disappointment. Also, like those mega-million dollar winners, you stand a great chance to end up in jail, dead broke or broke like most of them do because your mind is not conditioned to handle that kind of money suddenly. The same is true for people chanting affirmations everyday expecting that special someone to fall madly in love with them. Again, really? What if they would be a 21 st century version of Lady MacBeth to you? To use affirmations to find love in your life that you deserve is wonderful. You will become more loving and attract that love to you almost by default. However, in the Real World, relationships require work, time, patience and devotion on both parts and asking the Universe to hijack someone’s free will to make them love you is a plot in a Disney movie but hardly a real life goal.

Without destroying the power of actual and realistic affirmations, I want to say that, combined with meditation, mindfulness and allowing yourself to flow into the life of your highest level of consciousness, affirmations will activate the brain to look for those ideals you hold dear. I believe that flooding your mind

with positivity, drowns out and dilutes the negative self-talk that we seem to default back to unconsciously. When I was in outdoor sales, I was re-affirming all the reasons why I was a great sales professional, why I knew my product well, what the benefits were for the people I was going to see and how I was going to blend those benefits with them seamlessly. I blurred away any hint of nervousness and apprehension that would telegraph itself to my clients like a beacon light. Most people’s greatest fear is talking to audiences of strangers.

Whether a crowd in an auditorium or sitting in someone’s home, the idea that you are going to attempt to persuade them of a plan or concept which you have zero understanding ahead of time how they will receive the information that you present is scary. This is why most salespeople fail. I was great in sales and enjoyed people immensely. When I brought along a visiting vice president from out of town to join me, he remarked that my presentation was the best he had ever seen. Sales people are famous for the “hard close” at the end where they beat the client to death with techniques to make them sign on the dotted line. I never did that. I gave them a $10,000 presentation for a $2000 product with confidence and assurance that this is why they called me to come and aside from conditional objections, like bad credit or the loss of a job, there was no reason why I couldn’t provide them with my services. No one sells everybody and I didn’t either, but my affirmations I said in the car going over there supported my belief that I was as good as anybody in the field.

In the sales field there are one hundred things that could go wrong and in any given week fifty will, which is why we were not all millionaires. That is just a fact of life. However, to use affirmation to persuade your mind in advance that you are the best that there is and your best efforts will shine through in any circumstance regardless of what field you work in is why those who keep that positive mindset are happier on their jobs and get better results than 80% of the rest. Whatever you are doing, do it as a professional, as the best that ever did that job and look for the results that inevitably follow. Remember, activity precedes results.

Affirmations must be in the present state. The longest day in the world is “Someday.” Everybody is going to be great someday aren’t they? When you decide that you are a powerful, self-aware and confident individual right here and right now, you are, right now. To say to yourself one day you will be a success is to reaffirm that you aren’t currently. Then subconsciously your mind hears your say that and deducts all the reasons why you aren’t at your goal today. You are reaffirming you are everything you fear. A loser, a lightweight, an also-ran, a failure. You do not have a past anymore and you do not have a future anymore. You have right here and right now, Today! If you want to be wealthy, be specific to say how much money is wealthy to you. See it. Feel it in your hands, physically close your eyes and reach out and imagine yourself taking it off of a table, preferably your own table. If you want to live in a certain kind of house, go visit an open house and walk around in it. Touch the walls and feel the carpeting, look out of the windows and envision yourself living there. Make it as real as you possibly can in your mind. The car you want to drive exists already so go find it, imagine revving the engine and shifting it into gear for a drive. Sink into the seat and smell the interior. Make it yours. Give yourself a tangible vision so can create the mindset of opportunities to obtain them by your own efforts. Say your affirmations in a present tense, right here right now in a confident way. You got this. You own this, it is just a matter of taking the vision into reality.

Now the reason those who envision things and say affirmations are not all in jail is because we don’t run off with the car or move our furniture into the house of our dreams immediately. What we do however is motivate ourselves to find a way to acquire these things. When I wanted to make more money and the bank I was employed by threw every obstacle in my way to prevent that, my mind was open to new opportunities. I was recruited by a man who thought I would be great at a place where he worked and he was right. I took the job, doubled my salary and started looking for the car of my dreams. A 325i BMW, gunmetal grey with leather seats and loaded. It appeared on the car lot

and I decided this was it. I could afford it because I wanted a better job and attracted it, wanted the car and attracted it too. I was confident that whatever I wanted, as long as I worked for it, the funds would be available. I jettisoned the negative thinking that somehow I didn’t deserve it, that it was “too rich for my blood”. I believed that I was worth everything that I wanted and I wasn’t trying to egotistically impress others but I wanted comfort and to enjoy driving.

Affirmations reassured that everything in life was there for me, others could have it, then so could I. People sometimes confuse affirmations with self-delusion, egotistism or arrogance. This is based on the disease we had since birth of negativity. We were told don’t touch that, don’t do this or that, clean up your messy room, you’re such a slob, you aren’t good enough, we can’t afford that and on and on. With that kind of emotional trauma engraved so deeply into your psyche subconsciously, it may be hard to envision that you are worthy of anything more than the bare minimum. I have known wealthy people who have fine homes and beautiful surroundings that grew up during the Great Depression and painful impoverishment scarred them at a very young age. To this day even while sitting in fine comfort they consider themselves poor and what they have is inadequate even though they will never outlive their assets.

Positive affirmations are just as powerful, even more so, than those negative affirmations that people tell themselves. We use affirmations as a tool to rewire our brains for our own best development. Anything that would pull you down needs to be jettisoned over and over until it is alien to you and the positive affirmations stick. This is why you must make your affirmations positive. While that sounds overly simplistic, some folks miss this part. It is not an affirmation to say, “I don’t want to be poor anymore.” Or “I don’t want to fight with my spouse anymore.” “I don’t want to be overweight anymore”. You must frame it in a positive, current moment way. I was waking up grateful for the wealth I had and actually was counting it out in my mind when I was dead broke. I was already deciding how I was going to spend it while I woke up laying

on a mattress on the floor. I imagined the woman of my dreams when I was alone and traumatized but the last woman who wasn’t of my dreams, unless you want to consider a nightmare a dream. Today, I live with the woman of my dreams, my dear wife who amazes me every day and the most unlikely person I would have imagined being with but, here she is. If she understood English she would probably appreciate reading that I said this about her.

Meditation, mindfulness, being present, using your R.A.S. to turn on your brain for maximum results favorable to your personal goals, affirmations to help flood your mind with positive reinforcement all are based in neuroscience. If we used our brains to control our thoughts as opposed to our thoughts running away with us, we would be able to do so much more in our lives. The best news is that it is completely up to us. I hope that you can see that it is not magic, not some new age hippy dippy stuff but actual methods to develop the mind and hence the life that you want. There is nothing more powerful and unshakeable as a convinced mind. The chemicals that flow into your bloodstream, those bliss chemicals that your brain produces actually do more than alter your current state but effect your body at a cellular level altering your DNA which creates new cells and physically supports the New You. This goes into a field called epigenetics which is more complex than I wanted to cover in this book.

Suffice it to say, thoughts do become things in real life.

Guided Imagery

As you have seen by now, meditation can take many forms and styles. There is no one correct way to meditate and fortunately there is no actual wrong way to meditate. The freedom to allow yourself to flow into what works best for you relieves you from stressing out over “getting it right.� How long should you meditate? How long would you like to meditate? Which is the proper position to get into to meditate? What position is most comfortable for you to meditate? When will you find enlightenment and that blissful serenity as you meditate? When you stop seeking and striving for it and allow yourself to be at

peace. Meditation and personal development is just that, a personal journey.

The greatest happiness is that there are no barriers, no one on the planet short of someone being in a coma, is unable to benefit from meditation. It is being taught in elementary schools to students now, in prisons to inmates, at the workplaces to employees and also in nursing homes to the elderly. There are retreats and studios that offer teaching and practiced meditation and I also want to create one here in Peru’s beautiful Andes just for that purpose in the near future. No one “missed the boat� because of life circumstances or conditions. Anyone anywhere at any time can take a few minutes and flow into a meditative state and trigger the release of the bliss chemicals in your brain and breathe through some sort of stressful situation. Always be mindful of this.

Guided imagery has a special place in my heart because it was one of the first ways I learned mindfulness and meditation. I was not aware it was even a method of meditation because of my own preconceived notions about what I thought I knew meditation was and was not. Guided imagery is fun, it allows me to let go of the constraints of my immediate reality and soar off to anyplace or time I care to re-experience. I want to share with you here how and why it is so effective and I would recommend practicing it as part of your overall meditation/mindfulness practice.

I love simplicity so in explaining the basis of guided imagery meditation I try to be as basic as possible. Your brain cannot focus its attention on two opposing thoughts at the same time. This is why gratitude is so powerful to relieve stress and align you with a great day. The simple fact that your brain cannot tell the difference between something real or imagined can work to your benefit instantly, as well as against you. A perceived danger will cause your brain to fire off those fight, flee or freeze responses exactly as it would if an actual danger was present. This is why watching long hours of broadcast news and its hyper sensationalizing of tragedies and traumatic episodes are counter-productive for your wellbeing. Well, the opposite is just as true.

To create a great day in your mind and step into the world expecting to see it is equally as possible. Our bodies actually respond to a pleasant guided imagery experience just as though we actually did experience it. How powerful is it? I was talking to a woman who had high blood pressure issues. She has a blood pressure cuff monitor at her home. She took her blood pressure, wrote down the numbers and we did a session of guided imagery. She retook her blood pressure and was surprised to find her blood pressured had dropped ten points.

Most people aren’t aware of how powerful their imaginations are. Stress has been deemed an epidemic and root cause of many diseases that people are suffering from. We are changing that using simple methods and finding solutions within ourselves.

If your mind will respond the same way to a perceived paradise experience as actually being there, what the hell folks, do it! Some may feel intimidated because it seems silly at first. Every new experience seems silly until you become accustomed to it. No one is watching you, no one cares. This is your time. This is your personal retreat away from the current reality whatever that reality is, whether a boring desk in your office job, a line you are standing in at a bank or store, during an argument with your partner or co-worker or lying in bed at night waiting to drift into sleep. As soon as you are ready, your guided imagery experience waits for you to climb aboard and go anywhere you want.

I first like to use a place I have been to before because I have the sensory impressions of its scenery, smells and feel of the ambient sensations. I prefer to be alone because if I put people in my experience, I have to interact with other personalities and make adjustments and compromises. This is my time to be as into me as I ever cared to be. No one is looking at me, listening to me, judging me or reacting to me I can be as free as I want to be. Now I am going to guide you through an experience I use and I would like you to create your own

experience in guided imagery after you finish with this chapter. Just go with me and try to picture in your mind, as clearly as you can, what you are reading.

I am floating down gently from the bright blue sky, strapped securely to my bright yellow parachute. The warm breeze brushes against my face and the ground moves slowly up toward me as I descend down to the earth. I pull my toggles that steer me toward the inviting beach just below me. The off-white expanse of sand stretches for miles ahead of me as I gentle ease onto its surface. My parachute collapses behind me and I step out of the harness straps as I secure them to a nearby tree. I am wearing a crimson red tee-shirt and khaki shorts, bleached out by years of sun soaked hikes. I am barefoot and with each step I feel the damp white sand crunch under my feet. To my right is the turquoise blue ocean churning its curling waves toward me. The waves seem to be in sync with each one that follows behind. I look out over the whitecaps and see the heaving of the vast ocean readying itself for the next charge into the beautiful beach. Seagulls curiously circle me overhead, cawing out to me as if to welcome me to their world, I see four of them lazily gliding back and forth along the beach looking for food. The gentle breeze against my body is a perfect temperature for me, it is early summer and this is my favorite time to be on a solitude walk down this remote seascape paradise. I don’t know what time it is and I don’t care because this is my time now, this is my experience into my sense of calm and relaxation. There is nowhere I need to go and nothing will require my attention until I am ready to address it. The air has a mild salty smell to it blended with droplets caught in it from the waves crashing against the shoreline. The sun feels like a massage on my muscles and I walk down the beach. Each step feels like I am sinking a little deeper into relaxation and calm. I am in no particular hurry because this is my time to let go and just flow into this moment I have decided will be mine. I bend down and pick up a twisted dried piece of driftwood, about the size of my forearm. The texture is smooth and it is light in my hands. I will save it as a memento of this experience. With the ocean to my right, I stroll past a regiment of tall palm

trees to my left, lining the shoreline. The animals call out to me, I am one with them. I am one with all nature right now. I do not have a title, a place to report to, I do not even have a name right now, I am just essence, a part of all that surrounds me. I am welcomed here, the trees reach out to me with long dark green leaves, the birds and monkeys are not disturbed by my presence. I am safe here and I am contented by this experience. I notice my breathing slowing to a soft but deep inhalation and this feels so good to me. A gentle breath in that fills me completely and exhaling just as completely. I am alone, in my tranquility, I feel like I might be the only person on the whole planet. I am contented to be alone because everyone needs this time to unwind, release, relax and rejuvenate themselves. I want to sit on the beach under one of the beautiful palm trees and cross my legs to look out across the shimmering ocean. It is time to close my eyes and rest, maybe take a short nap, breathe in and out slowly, in rhythm with the waves as they surge inward and slide back out. Sleep comes so easily to me now. The soft dry sand seems to encase me like a giant hug around my whole body, a warm caress. Time, distance, even sounds seem to slowly fade out as I drift into a peaceful, contented, gentle sleep. This is my time to be my very best self. I feel strong, healthy, embracing this environment as my own slice of paradise. It is mine any time I want to come back to it and it will always be here for me. This is my guided meditation experience that I have designed for myself. What will yours look like?

I think guided meditation is great because you can use something like I just described here or your own creation, whatever you want it to be as long as you find it relaxing and it provides you what you need as you need it. This will also cause your brain to react as though you actually experienced the imagery. You will want to make it present tense, as colorful and descriptive as possible. If you like to eat, bring food. If you prefer people, invite them into your journey. If you prefer another location, the mountains, the forest or a cityscape, do it your own way. After all, it is your creation, whatever you need to feel at peace and fully relaxed and safe. If you notice, I used feeling words; safe, secure,

contented, welcoming, embracing. These are the sensations that I want to feel so I speak them into existence in my imagination.

You will want to use guided imagery together with your breathing exercises, closing your eyes and gently begin meditation as you normally would. This is an enhancer to that. Combining a variety of meditative practices makes it uniquely your own. When it is your own personal experience, like a mantra, you have a sense of awareness. Like going to a parking garage and finding your car among the hundreds that may be there. Ah, there it is, my looking around for it is over.

This also becomes part of your personal power. Power over things that would depress you, make you feel anxious or upset. Things that stress you out and anger you perhaps. You may not have all the answers as to how to manage everything happening around you but you can go inside and find peace within.

People are spending billions of dollars, that’s nine zeros, on medication that may have instant results and effect on their central nervous system, but at what price? Their side effects, possibility of dependency, the cost to their ability to manage life independent of the meds and medical and pharmaceutical expenses. Whatever you put into your body goes into every cell of your body, even to the nucleus which creates new cells which are altered by outside chemicals. What you are learning here, and in other materials, teachers, online videos and podcasts is the ability to live your own life on your own terms. It is available to everybody around the world. Only in recent years has it become more mainstream and acceptable in western cultures. Our acceptance and dependency of substances, legal or otherwise, is a mindset that perhaps medical professionals will begin to steer away from to embrace a natural and effective solution. Masking symptoms just doesn’t make much sense anymore. While there may be a place for medication for some, the ubiquitous use for every ailment and issue seems excessive.

Creating Habits That Serve You

It is a rare lightning strike of good fortune to have something you attempt to work perfectly the first time you attempt it. Every home run slugger was a rookie at one time. Every CEO of a company was a student learning their management skills somewhere. Every black belt martial artist started out with a white belt and shaky confidence. There are no born geniuses or experts. I still refuse to refer to myself as an expert and I seriously doubt experts actually exist because there is always something in their field of endeavor to learn.

What I am sharing with you in this book is what I currently know but I am still gaining new knowledge from others who practice mindfulness and meditation

as well as motivation, every day. No doubt they also learn more each day as well. So when you feel that you are barely scratching the surface, take heart, you are, and that in itself is a beginning of wisdom. Never stop learning.

Imagine trying to chop down a tree with a sharpened axe. You have your swing down, the axe is sharp and the tree is selected. If you strike the tree with your axe in twenty different places the tree will never fall. Imagine drilling a well for water. If you drill twenty holes each one four feet deep, you are going to be thirsty for a very long time.

Habits are the same way. To be effective with your meditation and mindfulness practice, you need to be consistent and find a time every day to step into it.

The reason why it is important to stay disciplined is because your brain needs time and consistency to carve a new habit into your mind so it will become your new normal. Opinions and science has varying periods of time. Some will tell you that it takes twenty one days to develop a habit and another ninety days for it to become engrained in your mind as a lifestyle. Others say that it will take sixty-six days to form new pathways into your mind so that it sticks. To undo a bad habit the same information applies. But I love simplicity and my simple response when I am asked about the time it takes to develop a lasting habit in your mind is, “Who cares?� Why? It is because if you are trying to develop a new habit in your mind, and you intend for that habit to become a permanent behavior, then it can be assumed that you will do it consistently and make it an everyday practice. Based on that thinking, am I going to check a calendar to see if I have been doing my new program for sixty six days, ninety days or a year? I seriously doubt that day sixty five is going to feel any different that day sixty six. Am I going to take a break at that point? No, because I remember the reason I started and why I will continue my patterns. If I deviate from my course, I would be on a course to break the habit.

Habits are formed. That is to say that your brain which is very malleable, the term is neuroplasticity, and can be molded and shaped to adapt to new

information and ways to do things. When we do a task repeatedly the same way it becomes second nature. Riding a bike, tying our shoes, engaging in team sports activities all require a learned and repeated skill.

When I learned to speak Spanish after moving to Peru, everything sounded like one long sentence. After being immersed in the language and culture for a year, Spanish didn’t sound like a foreign language any longer but still wasn’t familiar to me. After two years of hearing it almost exclusively, I began to get a grasp on short conversations. My brain began hearing familiar phrases and expressions. Today, while still not fluent, I speak Spanish more often than English most days. If a baby is in a home and has a Spanish speaking mother, and English speaking father, a Russian speaking grandmother and a German speaking grandfather, the child’s brain will adapt all four languages. As adults we filter out what we do not need in languages. I was amazed to meet young people who were travelling through Peru from Europe. Many spoke several languages. In the United States we primarily use just English. Our brains can be programmed to do almost anything if we accept that it will take practice and patience to learn because our brains need time to create the new pathways which in time become permanent.

Habits serve us. Disciplines, which some may attach a negative connotation to this word, are designed to serve us. Our developed behaviors are designed to serve us in whatever endeavor we choose to focus on. Our brains do not make the determination whether something is good or bad. It just acts upon whatever we put into it. Therefore, what you see and hear is what you become.

Your environment, that you choose to expose yourself to, will imprint a pattern eventually which will become normal for you. This is why we do not break a bad habit by trying “not to smoke” or “cut back on our drinking” because this is focusing on what we do not want, not what we aspire to become. Choose your environment and if it does not exist where you are, create it. Make your surroundings conducive to how you want to live. See it in your mind and create it all around you. If funds are not available, start with something small. In Peru,

my life was very basic, very humble and quite simple. When I wanted furniture and couldn’t afford to buy any, I found discarded large cardboard tubes and cut them into shapes that became tables and chairs. Making things out of cardboard became a habit and teaching the children in my project how to do it became fun for them. Making your environment aligned to what you want to become helps you to flow into your new lifestyle, which habits actually are doing for you.

People read, not to read a book but to become readers, a new habit. People don’t exercise because weights need to be picked up and put down but to become fit in body and mind. Martial artists don’t break boards because they couldn’t find a saw but to practice a discipline that they desire to become. In meditation, we practice, not to become a world class meditator, but to develop the tools and skills for an optimum life and to create an inner peace. We practice mindfulness so we can be excellent at focusing on a single task at hand, to appreciate each piece of our day whether we are just walking, enjoying a meal or in a conversation that we give our full attention to. We learn how to develop habits so that we can enhance our human experience wherever we are and whatever we will be doing. We learn to use our axe to strike the tree on the same place every time. The tree will fall. Decide on goals that you are interested in accomplishing whether in your relationships, on the job, in your community or a personal goal within yourself. Learn what you need to do to become like the best people who are already doing that goal. You have a computer, or phone to Google every bit of public information that exists on the planet so there is no reason or excuse not to be able to learn. Learn not only what they are today but also what obstacles they had to overcome, what hardships they endured. If you can learn more about their mindset, the disappointments and discouragements and how they rose above them, it will empower you to rise above your own shortcomings. If you go all gonzo nuts into your plans you will burn out quickly in most cases. The way to become an artist is not to buy all the art supplies in craft store and carry them home. You

will end up with a few attempts on a canvas and a closet full of paints and brushes for years. If you want to be a bodybuilder, you don’t start with four hundred pounds on a machine because you will rip out your tendons.

Success in any goal starts by taking small steps consistently every day and keep doing that each day, preferably at the same time, until you master each step.

Then you can add another small step which advances you toward your goal.

Who cares how long it takes you? Who is watching you? Who judges you?

When I finally started doing exercises after three months in quarantine in my apartment, I realized I haven’t exercised regularly in decades. I began movement exercises, arms swinging, rotations, stretches and deep knee bends and so forth. I felt ridiculous to be so out of shape but here I was getting back into shape. I was on my roof watching the sunset over the west as the reddening sky reflected off of the glaciers to my north and east. That was motivation for me. I love the scenery here in the Peruvian Andes. After a few weeks of doing forty repetitions of everything and wheezing and gasping at the end of each session, I found myself breathing easier. I found the repetitions easier to do and added another five to each exercise. Could I have added ten?

Sure, but why stretch myself that far? Each week I added five more to my routine consistently so I wouldn’t even notice to increase but the benefit would be achieved. I also read books, whether audio or in paperback form. I had gotten away from reading when there were too few English language books and magazines to be found in Peru. I dug through my old boxes and found several so I read every day. I stopped being the kind of person that has to do it all in one day and decided that everything in small bite sizes will get it done. I read a few pages, maybe five or six every day and before I knew it I had the book finished. Reading is part of my morning habit. I forgot how enjoyable it was. In my sketchbook, I touch something almost daily, small steps, small advances toward another finished piece of artwork that helps me focus intently which sharpens my mindfulness.

Your habits, which become your lifestyle, can serve you daily to accomplish what will seem impossible initially and soon you will find yourself reaching for the next challenge. My goal here is not to impress you about how I spend my day, but to share with you that small steps, one foot in front of the other, is how every journey is accomplished no matter what it is and no matter how impossible is seems to be. Your habits are not going to be a negation of one thing but the adaptation of something you want to step into. What doesn’t serve you to that end will drop away from you. This type of self-care brings you closer to the person that you have always wanted to become.

We read about motivation, leaping with massive energy into a huge undertaking with all sorts of rah-rah pep talks blasting from your sound system.

That kind of motivation seems to be short-lived. Without the underlying foundation of proper habit building, hyping yourself into a goal for instant results becomes a mere flash-in-the-pan experience that rarely if ever works out. I have been to pep rallies, sales seminars, church revivals and success for life retreats. Just like taking a pill for a long term mental condition like depression, these methods are quick acting but short lived and never reach the core issue to make the changes lasting. Form good habits, ride them into your everyday life and experience the lasting results because they become hardwired into your brain. Your new habits become an unconscious part of your day. What will feel uncomfortable is not doing your habits. For me, missing meditation in the morning would be like forgetting to make coffee or getting dressed. I could do it, but it would feel odd and out of character for me.

A last word about habits that you want to form and this is a big one. Your habits to even be considered worth your time and effort need to be something you feel you absolutely must do and you have to know why. It cannot be a novelty, not a “good idea” or something that you’ll try for a while to see what happens. What you are locking down is something that you believe in your heart that must happen and will happen because you will not accept anything short of accomplishing it.

What I would recommend is to carve out specifically, preferably in writing, what you want to accomplish, why it is important to you, where you will do it, what materials if any you need to get started, who might be joining you in the project, what time of day you will be doing it and what will be your way to measure your effectiveness. When you do that you are making it more concrete in your thinking. The more specific it is, the more real it is. If you need to readjust some of your overly optimistic milestones, that is all right. After all, most of how things turn out look much different than what you initially imagined the outcome to be. Look at where you are today and ask yourself if this is how you pictured yourself ten years ago. Almost every decision that you have ever made can be reversed if you needed to do it. The only mistake it to never take the step in making a decision to better yourself. I know people who decided years ago to take a little break and haven’t moved off of the couch since. They wonder why their lives are so dull and uneventful. You will never be one of them and neither will I.

Motivation

What gets you out of bed every day and makes you look forward to the new day? It will be different for everybody. Your sense of purpose in this life is a driving force that makes everything you may ever learn about mindfulness and meditation come to life. Most people have no clue what their purpose in life is and spend their eight or nine decades on this planet taking a free ride around the sun year after year. If you have ever been to a cemetery and looked at the many tombstones and grave markers you will notice there is a date of birth a date of death and a dash in between them. That dash represents all the time in between those dates. For most it will just be a dash, a space and nothing more.

The graveyard is full of great unfulfilled ideas, books that were never written, plays never performed, songs that were never sung and words that were never spoken. In those graves are people who had dreams and plans and ideas that could have enhanced this human family experience perhaps globally. They left this world without leaving a footprint or a single hint that they were ever here.

That, my friends, is the true unfortunate tragedy of death. There are no encore appearances. Was it a lack of self-esteem, self-worth or a lack of belief in their abilities that caused their lives to float from the crib to the grave with a life in between? In most developed nations there are opportunities so abundant that we literally trip over them. The internet advertises how simple it is to publish your book, your stories or poems. You can write a screenplay or stage production. You can share your thoughts on YouTube, live streams, podcasts or bring people together in either live or online groups to shares like interests.

People are always making new inventions to make life more convenient and time-saving and the produce those inventions which millions use every day.

The days of excuses are vaporized by the advent of Google (I don’t know how) or I am too young, nobody will listen to me (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) or I am too old my best days are behind me (KFC’s Colonel Sanders) I don’t have enough start-up money (GoFundMe) I am not in the right place at the right time (Jordan Belfort wrote the Wolf of Wall Street, in prison) I don’t have the right team to back me up, (The Beatles were told to forget about being a guitar band, those days were over.) The “experts” all predict against the odds of success, (1901 the U.S. patent office stated that they may close soon because everything that could ever be invented has already been invented) I am not knowledgeable in the field, (The Wright brothers invented the first manned airplane to successfully fly, they were bicycle mechanics.) Everybody who decided to make a difference in the world, whether a small ripple or a huge splash, succeeded because they were not going to die without leaving their footprint for mankind to follow.

Your impact may be an e-book (like this one?) that a few, or a few thousand, or a few million, will read. So what? What you create may help a handful of people but you have no idea who is in that handful of followers. Imagine a young student sitting in a South African school classroom taking notes. His teacher was doing her job as she did every day to the dozens that attended classes. How was she to know that one of her students was Nelson Mandela that changed the shape of South Africa forever? Every fire started with just a small spark, a tiny flame. If you think that your inspiration will be unnoticed you might want to think again. Vincent Van Gogh, whose magnificent paintings have captured the attention of every artist in modern times, died in 1890 in poverty and obscurity. He sold only one painting in his lifetime for just 400 Francs. Today his Starry Night is valued at over 100 million dollars.

What motivated you will pull you along toward your success. Every failure, and there will be failures along the way, are stepping stones to stand on top of so you can see better and farther than you ever could before. As I wrote earlier, it has to be a compelling mission, a powerful driving urge to create, invent, become or do something that you consider significant. It doesn’t matter who else believes it and if no one does, that is just fine. Let them see you through the dust clouds you leave behind. It has to be your MUST, to get you out of bed in the morning. No one did anything of any importance if they only considered it “A good idea”, because when those inevitable challenges emerge at the worst possible time, you will find a reason to give up. I have sat on barstools in my earlier days of inertia and listened to ideas and plans people had to do great things and they sounded reasonably capable of success. Those ideas drowned in pint after pint of beer. No one will believe in you if you do not believe in yourself. After repeated failures and tweaking, your plans to re-adjust for earlier mistakes, you eventually become on track to success. Consider the guy that invented the Hoola hoop, Pet Rocks, and the Smiley Face logo with the slogan “Have a Nice Day” simple but millions bought them. One of the motivations that I had to become a writer and author was reading terrible

books that I couldn’t believe someone published and others bought. I was motivated to become an artist, in part because I couldn’t speak Spanish when I first came to Peru and art was my way of communicating with the children of my project, but another reason was visiting modern art museums in New York and Washington D.C. and saw utter nonsense that was displayed. My attitude was, “If they can do it, so can I” and so I did. As of this writing I have exhibited my art in eight venues, five were national museums. Artwork that I thought was trash and was going to throw away, I framed and put on a museum gallery wall. People were taking selfies with it. The only bad ideas are the ones you never attempted to try. The Wright brothers were famous for flying a manned airplane, they were not famous for crashing dozens of times before they finally got it right. Baseball superstars have .325 batting averages meaning they failed to get on base, struck out, 2/3 of the time and yet, are considered great in their sport. A winner is a loser who tried just one more time.

Motivation, which a daily meditation practice will help to instill in you, is a passion and a power that gives you a purpose and life a meaning. It is written that Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t have a dream, his dream had him. It is true.

While your meditation practice clears your thinking, creates a surge of the bliss chemicals from your brain to fuse into every cell of your body and causes you to see the world from a place of victory, love, empathy and compassion as well as clear thinking and vision, motivation gives you the wheels under you to utilize the new and best version of yourself to influence and inspire those around you. Whether that is simply your family and friends or a community or the world does not really matter. What you offer out into the world will be embraced, in time, by those whose energies and like mindedness it attracts.

My personal story of creating Changes for New Hope, my non-profit charity in Peru was a disaster from day one. In 2009, after my 2007 visit to Nicaragua’s villages of destitute and vulnerable children, I decided to create my own project somewhere in Latin America. My total and absolute belief that it can be done and rejection of excuses helped me to step over, around, under and

through every obstacle. I was told to forget about it, go home, it was tried and failed by people better prepared than I was, I was wasting my time and money.

There were too many instances where it seemed that they were right, but those failures made me stronger, helped me to find a new and better way and in spite of the overwhelming odds, by the end of 2019, my mission was accomplished. Over 6000 disadvantaged children have been helped, over nine tons of humanitarian supplies were distributed, over one thousand pairs of new shoes were on little feet and vitamins and anti-parasite medicine has been issued to many thousands. Libraries received books, school supplies were delivered to children in schools who were without and every voice of criticism and contempt was silenced. It was my Must. What I endured to create that success story is heart breaking but no one remembers our failures anymore.

People are remembered for their successes and you will be too. Don’t do it for the money, don’t do it for the fame and recognition but do it because you are able to leave behind a footprint that will somehow, someday inspire people, that will make the world, at least your piece of it, a better place. What is the meaning to life? It is to be a value to the human family.

People who believe themselves to be A+ will do A+ work. That means you need a strong self-image that looks back at you in the mirror every day. Not conceit and false pride. Glory seekers and attention seekers are self-delusional.

However, self-love, self-awareness is healthy and necessary. How can you “Love your neighbor as yourself” if you do not first love yourself? I love myself and I love all there is that makes me Jim Killon. I believe in my own greatness and it is equal to the greatness that I believe you are, no more and no less. You may speak to me out from a place of your pain, or insecurities, you are still a great person inhabiting this planet with me.

Imagine yourself (guided imagery) as a wealthy person, living in a mansion that you just drove up to in your shiny Rolls Royce. Picture yourself stepping out of it wearing the most comfortable clothes that you ever slid into. Your shoes are so comfortable you feel like you are wearing tiny clouds on your feet. Now

stand up with that image of yourself in mind and walk across the floor. Try it right now. Notice how you would walk as that person. Not a care in the world, everything is taken care of for you. Why not be that person right now? Walk like the world is yours. Approach every person you meet with the confidence that they are friends that maybe you just haven’t met yet. Your thoughts are real things, not just idle imaginings. Whether you are imagining success and victory or disaster and ruin, your thoughts produce matching actions.

Everything that you can see, feel, hear, touch, smell and taste made by man, started out as a creation in their thinking. For good or for evil, for altruistic and philanthropic ends or for genocide and oppressive world dominance, thoughts become actual things. No one ever became a success and thought to themselves “Well, that was a shocker, how did I ever do that?� Instead, they envisioned it and then stepped into it. I stepped into the success that Changes for New Hope eventually became when I was living in one small room, eating just one meal a day and scrounging for donations to make sure the children that I would see the next day had supplies. As a former day trader, I was walking down the street thinking of how I would be investing large assets for maximum returns when I had just $100 to my name. I walked down the street like a winner because, while I was yet to become that version of myself, I understood the power of my thoughts and wealth was inbound though as yet I had no idea how that was going to happen. My meditation set my compass for the day, my attitude and my inner strength so whatever would be occurring, I could manage it, never let the disappointments drag me down for long (yes I also get to be human too) and my reticular activating system, that sees what I am looking for, will soon appear. There is no luck or miracles. We create our own with so much confidence and certainty that they are expected and our gratitude ensures them.

Motivation, is action taking and stepping with confidence that your Must will be realized. Taking it as it comes, living day to day, drifting aimlessly will cause you to end up in one of those graveyards with a blank dash between your dates

of birth and death. That is not you. Find your Must. Discover your purpose, what are you going to leave behind for like-minded people to draw from? Was Vincent Van Gogh a terrible artist just because no one recognized his greatness and he only sold one painting in his lifetime? Evidently not. He was great but as yet undiscovered. His works did not get better over the years, people just noticed him. I don’t know how many people have bought and read any of my nine previous books to this one. None have made it to the best sellers list anywhere, yet. People who do read them tell me they love what I shared. It inspired them and some say they re-read them when they need inspiration. I write to express myself. Perhaps I can touch the life of someone who will end up doing great things for millions of people in the world. Van Gogh painted because he was a painter. I write because I am a writer. Whoever finds value in my words I am grateful for the opportunity to share and raise their consciousness where I can. This is where I find joy and contentment. This, blended with my artwork, my speaking to groups wherever I am able to go, and the projects that put me in a position to serve the disadvantaged among us is my Must, it is what gets me out of bed in the morning and it is my contribution to the world and the footprint I leave behind. In the Tao, I have learned that I am No-Thing, an emptiness of a bowl that is able to hold the soup to nourish others. I am the holes in a wall that become the door and windows for people to enter through and see out of. Being No-Thing allows me to become all things for many people. In meditation and mindfulness, I have learned that simplicity of being essence, I Am, is enough. I am not a title, a position, a career, an age, a sex, a nationality, a religion, a political affiliation or a socio-economic status. I have erased the lines that divide me from everyone else and now I can see clearly that we are all one human family. I can embrace the world. I am ever learning and always finding new solutions to the challenges that we struggle with. I am someone named Jim Killon, an ordinary man who gives an extraordinary damn, and it is enough.

I hope that this book has given you a glimpse into what is possible in your life. I would never be able to write exhaustively about all manners of meditation or everything there is to know about mindfulness. No one wants to read a book that would be too heavy to carry or would exhaust the memory of their computer.

Currently, I am quite excited about creating my next project, Mind Encounter (mindencounter.com) during the coronavirus quarantine isolation here in Peru.

This will allow me to reach people virtually now that meeting in groups is no longer a possibility anytime in the near future. I take heart in that Bill Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in quarantine in England during the bubonic plague. You cannot stop someone that won’t be stopped. Let’s make sure one of those people is you.

Live large my friends, live deliberately.

Jim Killon

About the Author: Jim Killon is an American born humanitarian, author, artist and sage. His project, Changes for New Hope (www.changesfornewhope.com) was created in the Peruvian Andes in 2009 to reach disadvantaged children living in destitution. What he discovered about himself, as well as those he encountered, became the source for several of his books and writings, including and especially this one. Mind Encounter (www.mindencounter.com)

is his spinoff project that will use virtual and online technology to embrace those interested in learning more about mindfulness, meditation practices and motivation.

He is the 2017 recipient of the David Chow Humanitarian Award and the 2019 Books for Peace Special Award.

He currently lives in the Peruvian Andes at an altitude of 3000 meters above sea level with his Peruvian wife and three children. He practices his meditation program daily, lives as a minimalist in simplicity and embraces the teachings of the Tao Te Ching.

“If you want to see the impossible accomplished, attempt the impossible.�