In any life there are defining moments, points of self-discovery. For me the most important are when I discover a new level of comfort with being me, myself. Up to that point I’ve not been aware, necessarily, of any particular discomfort. Then comes this sense of having expanded into a part of myself that was waiting. It’s like I look and see that the skin has stretched to accommodate more of myself. I’m all here—and then some. That sensation of expansion into ‘more of me’ is such that I want to celebrate it.
I’m finding myself dressed out in a stunningly attractive and perfectly fitting new suit—except that it feels already old and comfortable and lived-in. Maybe I’ve grown into the next size, without quite knowing it. Having become more of my ownself, I seem to move around in new space.
When I reach this new level of comfort with myself, I’m aware that certain things have dropped away; they’re conspicuous in their absence. Missing, for example, is the need to question my decisions or actions. I can just go ahead and say or do something without pausing to test the waters. That new trust level saves all kinds of time.
Also, I don’t have to wonder where I want to go. Each day seems to beckon with its potentials, and I just move out, into and through each situation, enjoying the fulfillment of its possibilities. I seem to already know those venues where I’ll enjoy the most satisfying interactions or discoveries. When they occur I think: I didn’t know this would happen, but now that it has, I see that it was inevitable.
The world seems more alive and friendly, and I’m aware of the reason: I am more alive and friendly. There's much more of yourself to expand into! Visit www.myjimballard.com
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Paramahansa Yogananda is often credited with being the person who introduced yoga to the West. The great sage came to this country from India in 1920 as a young man and remained, except for a year-long visit back to India, until his death here in 1952. After years of traveling the country, drawing huge crowds to his lectures on meditation and on living so as to find true happiness, Yogananda concentrated on spiritually deepening and enriching the lives of his followers. He founded Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF), calling it a “church of all religions”; today it is a worldwide organization numbering tens of thousands.
To Westerners accustomed to thinking of religion as a set of beliefs, Yogananda was the first to define it as scientific practice. With Christianity he easily harmonized the ancient Hindu concepts of maya or cosmic delusion, the Mother aspect of God, and the dream nature of the world (foreshadowing current discoveries of particle science). Going beyond the definition of yoga as the practice of certain postures, he called yoga “the science of personal communion with the Divine”. Through written Lessons he introduced specific techniques of meditation for producing direct personal experience of God. By comparing human life to an ocean wave which rises from the sea and travels for a while, to sink again and become one with its source, Yogananda provided a simple and compelling version of death as a returning to our true nature as Spirit. (My book Little Wave and Old Swell is based on the Master's metaphor.) He also spoke often of the need to develop the intuition, describing it as the bridge between mind and soul.
Yogananda wrote many books, of which the best known is the spiritual classic, Autobiography of A Yogi. His recently published two-volume set entitled The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You, is swiftly gaining readers who seek a broader understanding of the teachings of Jesus. The SRF Lessons, mailed to all who request them (www.yogananda-srf.org), cover not only how to meditate but how to live so as to achieve success and supreme fulfillment in any endeavor.
I have never found anyone whose writings so accurately and movingly capture the truth of my own being. No dreamy idealist, Yogananda taught practical methods of melding the spiritual with the everyday challenges of living. His poetry and affirmations possess an amazing power to awaken and revitalize one’s experience of joy. One example from his Scientific Healing Affirmations is useful for repeating amidst the stresses of every day:
I relax and cast aside all mental burdens,
allowing God to express through me
His perfect love, peace, and wisdom.
Another, for use in healing the body:
My body cells are made of Light;
My fleshly cells are made of Thee.
They are perfect for Thou art perfect;
They are Spirit, for I am He.
For coaching in how to live as Yogananda said, "with head in the clouds and feet on the ground," visit www.myjimballard.com
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Moments are all we have, but they go by so fast and there are so many of them we tend to think they’re not important. Here’s how important moments are: everything you ever did, everything that ever happened to you, happened in a moment.
Since moments are what we live in, they require attention. Every waking moment of your life consists of what you pay attention to. It’s possible to stay alert and give full attention to whatever’s happening in the present. You probably did it when you were little, but most of us gave that up long ago. Becoming an adult these days seems to mean shifting attention from the moment you’re in to future moments. Adults live whole days without being in the moments they are in, always thinking what’s next. Take the average adult. Once in a while her attention has returned to the moment she was in, but she’s already used up 12,466,839,155,376 of today’s moments being someplace else -- up ahead, where she can’t possibly make a difference from the moment she’s occupying.
I don’t mean we should never think of the future. Planning and goal-setting and visioning are fine and necessary uses of present moments. Once they’re in place, though, they should be put in the set-it-and-forget-it category, like your watch. When I say we’re using up precious moments I’m talking about fussing about what’s next. While our attention is on future moments rather than the ones we’re in, we sort of don’t exist, except in fantasy. We’re not where we are, so we might as well not be around at all. Keeping our minds on what’s next rather than what’s in front of us means we’re always distracted. That’s very stressful and wasteful of energy. Conversely, the moment the mind let’s go of what’s next and returns full attention to what’s now, it relaxes. It feels the joy of returning home; now it’s fully available for what it has in front of it.
A friend of mine, Spencer Johnson, wrote a book called The Precious Present. The story is about a grandfather who keeps talking about the precious present, and a boy who keeps expecting it to be a gift wrapped up like a birthday present. It turns out the precious present is the present: this moment -- and this one -- and this one. Moments are precious because they go by so fast and can so easily be squandered.
A very wise man named Paramahansa Yogananda once said,
You are the master of the moments of your life.
He meant that each of us gets to decide what we spend our moments on. Most of us could probably say that many of our past moments have been misused. Misused moments make up misused lives. But other moments—those we were fully present in, fully ourselves, fully joyfully on-target—were used to the full. And lots of moments used to the full make up fully used-up lives. Ones we can look back on and say, “Good show.”
That’s why Yogananda said,
The moments are more important than the years.
Good coaching enables the client to be effective in real time -- i.e., in the moment. Visit www.myjimballard.com
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The circadian rhythms by which plants, animals and young children live suggest that “body time” is realer than “clock time.” When we are run solely by clock time we lose much of the joy and vitality waiting to be tapped in each waking moment of Now. Our spontaneity and creativity are generated outside of measurable time, so by visiting there we gain ideas and products to be used within real-time.
Free yourself from the tyranny of time by changing the way you look at it. View time and space as they come to you in the form of experiences and relationships. Revisit your aspirations, dreams and hopes regularly. Observe the perpetual current of thoughts and emotions that arise within you. Life is manifesting itself richly in all these ways, to all of which clock time is totally irrelevant. Some tips for changing the way you perceive and experience time:
Enter the day. Get up early when the house is quiet, and spend some time being calm and contemplative. Write in a journal, or seek quiet inspiration from books or scriptures that will stay with you throughout the hours ahead. Resolve never again to “hit the ground running.”
Unmask a clock. Get a clock and look at it. See it for what it is, a simple repeating machine, not unlike a metronome. The intervals it measures are purely arbitrary, made up by someone and agreed-to by all. Keeping time is merely keeping an agreement. Reflect on the absurdity of having your life, even a day of it, run by a tick-tock machine.
Make time go away. During one of your morning reflections, think about those times when you are so into what you are doing that time is absent and unimportant. Write down a list of endings for the phrase, “Time goes away when . . . ” Look over the list and ask yourself, what are the patterns? What is repeatable about such times? Devise ways to incorporate those elements into more of what you do at work.
Relax and concentrate. Adopt a philosophy of, “Don’t hurry. Don’t stop.” Resolve to do each thing you do today well and with concentration and relaxation. Whenever you are tempted to rush, resist it. Take a few deep breaths, relax, and concentrate. The paradox is, keeping to the don’t-hurry-don’t-stop rule saves time.
Delegate. Recall sick days when the world went on without your help, when others somehow did what you thought only you could do. Think of sharing duties as giving the gift of contributing to others. Every day review your to-do list to see what items can be delegated, or the responsibility shared. Gladly and without guilt present these to others.
Be time-rich. A good mantra is: “I have all the time in the world to do the right thing I came to this moment to do.” As you work from a time-rich instead of a time-famished base, you’ll get far more done in far less time -- and enjoy it more.
Celebrate a slow-down. Whenever you get behind a slow driver or experience any other delay, heave a sigh and thank your heavens for reminding you that you have all the time in the world.
My friend and co-author Ken Blanchard travels all over the world giving speeches to top leaders and heads of companies. People soak up what he says, and many show up after a talk to ask the same question: “If there were one bit of advice you could give us, above all the rest, what would it be?” Without hesitation Ken replies, “Start catching people doing things right.”
Back in 2004 Ken and I, working with friends Thad Lacinek and Chuck Tompkins — the guys in charge of training killer whales at SeaWorld--put that advice in the form of a book titled Whale Done! the Power of Positive Relationships. It’s a story about Wes Kingsley, a man who’s not getting along with people at work or at home, who goes to the Shamu Show. Like the rest of the audience, Wes wonders how they get those killer whales to perform so spectacularly. When he meets the trainer and asks if they starve the animals or otherwise punish them, he’s told, “It’s not a good idea to punish a killer whale and then get in the water with him.” Instead, Wes learns that the formula is simple:
Set things up for success.
Ignore or redirect failure.
Praise success (ie., give a Whale Done!).
The idea is an old one: accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative. When Wes starts applying the steps at work and at home, his world turns around.
The second book in the Whale Done series, Whale Done Parenting, is due out in October. As the title implies, its story focuses on raising children following the same rules. Amy, a mother of a two-year-old, is training to be a killer whale trainer. She brings the Whale Done principles home and applies them to the raising of her son. The typical issues of parenting a tot -- potty training, tantrums, mealtimes, bedtimes, sharing, etc. — all get the Whale Done treatment. A third book, The Whale Done School, is in the works for next year. It’s to be based on the work of Cynthia Zurchin, a courageous elementary principal who turned a troubled Pittsburgh school around using the Whale Done approach.
Catching people doing things right is simple, but it’s far from easy. That’s because we’re accustomed to noticing the things people do wrong. A simple misteak grabs our attention, and we think we should correct it. But strange magic happens when we begin to shift our attention onto what people do right. When we do, there’s plenty to pick up on. As soon as you start noticing people’s good stuff, and calling their attention to it, be ready for them to do some weird things. We’re all of us so used to living in a world of gotcha’s that a Whale Done — a pat on the back, a compliment, a praising or bit of recognition – coming out of left field can turn us around. It can change our motivation, because we want to do more of what got the sunshine.
So take Ken Blanchard’s advice with your kids, your students, your employees, your spouse, or even your boss: Start catching them doing things right.
"Catching" people requires retraining our attention, a skill of invaluable worth. Need a coach for this? Visit www.myjimballard.com
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