Tag: meditation

  • The Nuance Behind Tomato Sauce

    The Nuance Behind Tomato Sauce

    Jacques de Villiers – writing quest: Article 45/365

    I remember my first trip to Italy and the amazing food. I battled with the food at first. For decades, I ruined my taste buds with all the sauces I put on my food like tomato sauce, Tabasco, and chilly sauce.

    I was used to * All Gold Tomato Sauce and its ’36 tomatoes in a bottle’. Not freshly crushed tomatoes in a bowl.

    Initially, the food tasted bland, and I was always reaching for the salt. After a week my taste buds became attuned to the nuance of the food, and a whole new world of flavour opened up to me. 

    Perhaps we ‘tomato sauce’ our own lives. We hide our feelings by using things like alcohol, drugs, sex, binge-watching Netflix, and similar activities.

    We’re trying to suppress and repress the *goggas so that we don’t have to deal with them. You’re smart enough to know that doesn’t work. They’re going to surface somewhere, and when you least expect them. 

    If you’ve ever felt negative emotions like being passive-aggressive, intolerant, unkind, shamed, shaming, depressed, complaining, apathetic, guilty, angry, and sorry for yourself, those are the goggas. 

    In my experience, I’ve found that if I bring any negative feeling into the open and observe it without judgement, it eventually dissipates. Sometimes quickly and sometimes I wrestle with something for weeks.  And, mostly, for me, it’s hard. I’m so tempted to avoid anything unpleasant that I want to desperately ‘tomato sauce’ it. 

    When the negative things disappear I become lighter (light).

    And, of course, when my taste buds are more attuned to nuances and subtleties, things just taste better. And, this leads to gratitude and awe. I am more attuned to noticing the miracles in and around me. It’s heady and delicious. 

    How does one play in the world of nuance and bring out the magnificent flavour that is this life? 

    The only way I know how to do it is through meditation. It’s in the stillness that my consciousness calibrates, my gratitude grows, and my awe awakens.

    Join me on this adventure from unconsciousness to consciousness using the Map of Consciousness. Let’s figure this out together, you and I.

    * For my international readers – goggas is the Afrikaans colloquialism for insects. And, tomato sauce is ketchup.

  • Armour Up

    Armour Up

    Jacques de Villiers – writing quest: Article 37/365

    I know it’s probably sacrilege to say that I’ve never really gotten into Robin Sharma (The 5 AM Club – Morning Routine) or Jay Shetty, the two monk superstars. Both of them are proponents of morning rituals.

    My speed is more Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun. Her book, When Things Fall Apart, has been a loyal companion to me over the years. 

    I perhaps have something to crow about. I’d been doing the morning rituals long before they wrote about it. First five years of boarding school at 13, and then two years of military service. But, that was never voluntary, so it probably doesn’t count.

    Voluntarily, I’ve been doing morning rituals for nearly 40 years, with meditation being my mainstay.

    I am a bit monkish about it when I say, “Morning for me. Afternoon for everyone else.”

    Every morning, I start my day by praying, meditating, writing, and walking. I do this because I understand that as the day goes on, challenges will gradually weaken my determination. By four pm I’m done.

    The other day, I forwent my ritual and didn’t meditate or walk. I paid the price. The day went sideways. I dropped my cell phone twice, how it didn’t break is a miracle. I wrote the biggest claptrap of an article I’ve written in years. My left calf played up, and I ended up limping (any calf whisperers out there that can tell me the meaning.) And, I irritated everyone I spoke to that day. I was clumsy and inarticulate (read into it ‘rude’).

    Now I know that, as Aristotle said, “One swallow does not a summer make.” So, perhaps I shouldn’t read too much into it. But this is not the first time that I have slipped my discipline and things went wrong.  

    Establishing a set of morning rituals is as essential as taking your vitamins. You don’t really notice a difference until you stop taking them. Then watch the wheels fall off. 

    Damn you, Robin Sharma, now I’m going to have to read your book, won’t I?

  • Meditating Through Madness

    Meditating Through Madness

    Jacques de Villiers – writing quest: Article 33/365

    I’ve been meditating for more than 30 years now. It has probably been the single best practice that has kept me from totally unmooring from this reality. 

    Meditation seems to imitate life or life imitates it.

    For me meditation is about taking my mind and my emotions into a place of stillness. Or as Dr. Joe Dispenza puts it, becoming no thing, no body, no place and no time. 

    It’s all about breathing in the meditation I practice. It’s pretty much all about breathing in life too, isn’t it?

    During meditation, if my mind drifts, I bring my attention back by focusing on my breath through my nose.

    Meditation reveals the extent of my scatteredness and how easily I become distracted. A bird chirping takes me out of no thing. An aeroplane overhead gets my attention. An itch needs to be scratched. A thought needs to be followed. A fly needs to be shooed away.

    I’ve trained myself to allow myself to acknowledge those distractions. I don’t use the force of willpower to banish them from my consciousness. I let them go by returning to the breath.

    I always plan to have the perfect meditation, and it never happens. Sometimes out of the hour, I get 45 minutes of ‘real’ meditation. Sometimes 30 minutes. And, sometimes when things really go awry, five minutes. But even five minutes is valuable. For me five minutes of meditation is worth five hours in the gym. And, if I had to choose, I’d always choose the five minutes of meditation over the five hours of gym. Not because gym is hard, but because meditation is more likely to take me to where I really need to be on this journey.

    Here’s the thing: those five minutes are valuable to me and to the entire consciousness of the planet. Those five minutes get me through the madness.

    If you think you’re too small to make a difference, you’ve never been to bed with a mosquito.

    Anita Roddick, author of Business Unusual

    Always back to the breath

    Isn’t life akin to meditation? We have plans (purpose) to impact the planet (or, at least our corner of it) and then things happen to distract us and take us off our path. When you feel distracted, gently remind yourself of your purpose (breath) and fulfil the promise that is in you.

    Nothing we do will ever be perfect (in my experience, at least), but what we do matters. 

    If you don’t believe me, take Jesus for example. His ministry was a mere three years, and look at the astounding impact he made. 

    What do you think you can do in three years? One year? Five minutes? 

    Go do that. Go now!

  • Mindfulness

    Mindfulness

    Mindfulness: Why do you play so small?

    Mindfulness. This is a weekly newsletter I send out called Find a Path With Heart.

    Here are the statistics:

    Date: 30 November 2017 – 17h05
    Sent: 653
    Opens: 409 (62,83%)
    Clicks: 73 (11,21%)

    Hey Friend,

    In today’s mindfulness article I’ll be short and sweet. Strangely enough.

    Why Do You Play Small?

    I wrote Why Do You Play Small? to try and make sense of my self-loathing issues
    (don’t judge, I’m not the only one) ;-).

    Weirdly, this stems from coming from an intellectually brilliant family.

    A brilliant mind, a world-renowned surgeon and a mule breeder
    (who also happened to run a little company called the KWV) caused all
    the kak in my mind.

    If you’re trying to fill big shoes and have small feet, maybe this
    blog post will resonate with you.

    Size Does Count

    Help me out, please. My girlfriend, Celia really thinks that size
    does count and I’m coming up short on that score.

    She thinks that I have a big …

    database. Yes, the one you’re on now. She thinks I have 15 000 peeps on it.

    Shame, poor woman. There’s only 700 on this list. Only 30% actually open my stuff.
    And, less than 1% click through.
    If you’re in database marketing, you know how depressing this is.

    But anyway, she sells teepees for children. Who even knew that it was a thing?
    But, she makes more money than me, so that’s cool thing.
    Except she wants to make more money and has been nagging me to send a
    marketing mailer out to you.

    “But, darling, they’re not interested in teepees for their children.
    This is a serious business-minded lot.” I said.

    So, now I’m on the couch. So, please, just go and look at her offer, you’ll be doing
    me a favour. Evidently, she has some teepees on a special offer sale.
    One of these Black Friday or Cyber Monday things. Just go and have a
    look please. Oh, and consider buying one so that I can get off this couch. Go here.

    How I Got My Ass Handed To Me

    Because I’m so arrogant, I think I can do anything. So, I tried my hand at designing
    a book cover for one of my author clients, Colleen O’ Donnell. Well my friend,
    Deborah du Plooy from Skoobs Theatre of Books, said it was k#k.

    She got me in touch with a book jacket designer called Gregg Davies.
    Based on his work, I’ve decided to stick to my knitting.
    He really showed me what a pro can do.
    Go have a look at my effort and his effort. You make the call. Look here.

    If You’re a Successful Motivational Speaker, Don’t Read The Next Article (working 10 days or more)

    Most professional speakers battle to get found for keyword terms like “motivational speaker”,
    “business speaker” and the like on Google.

    I help solve this so that they can be found. Check out how being #6 in Google equals R70 000
    per month in speaking and training gigs. Oh, there’s an offer you can’t refuse.
    But it ends Friday night at midnight (tomorrow night). Then I switch the landing page off. Go here.

    LinkedIn and Dux-Soup Experiment

    I’m going to get the paid for version of Dux-Soup so that I can visit up to 1000 LinkedIn profiles a day.
    On the free version I can only visit 100 profiles.
    Supposedly, 7% of those connections I visit will come and visit my profile page. That’s 70.
    If only 10% connect, that’s 7 extra connections a day. I can live with that.
    So, let’s see if it works out. I’ll keep you in the loop. Speaking about LinkedIn,
    check out my profile page – I’m experimenting with problem-promise-solution copy.
    It’s been quite successful as I’m getting 10 new connections a day.
    I’ve also had more than 3000 post views in November.
    It may work for you too. Go here.

    Find a path with heart,

    Talk soon,

    Jacques
    082 906 3693

    Subscribe to more mindfulness articles here.

    Mindfulness

    Whilst we’re on the subject of mindfulness, let’s figure out what it is.

    Join our mindfulness Facebook Group.

    Here’s a Wiki definition: Mindfulness is the psychological process of bringing one’s attention to experiences occurring in the present moment, which can be developed through the practice of meditation and other training.

    Mindfulness and meditationI think that more and more people are practicing mindfulness because their outer lives are a shambles.

    This striving for status and money is a futile exercise to achieve happiness.

    We are all striving for some kind of security, power, fulfilment and harmony.

    We tend to focus more on the security/power aspect than on the fulfilment/harmony aspect.

    As Etsko Schuitema said, “No amount of zeros on your pay cheque will fill that hole in your chest called insecurity.”

    And, this is true. Striving for an having possessions never leads to happiness, does it. I’m not denying that ‘things’ make one’s life easier.

    We all want food, a roof over our head and someone to love and be loved by. But the car, the house, the shoes and the like are like Will-o’-the-wisps (foolish fires) that are normally found in bogs and swamps. They lead the traveller off the safe path. As soon as we think we’ve caught up with the wisp, it moves on. As soon as we get the new car, that amazing ‘new car’ feeling moves on. Now we want another, better car. We want a better house. We want better shoes. We want a better wife. We want a better husband. And so on …

    The trick to it all is to go inside and find inner happiness.

    In my opinion, this can only be done through prayer, meditation and journaling (and maybe yoga ;-))

    These 4 elements are an essential part of mindfulness.