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“It’s been a long time, I shouldn’t have left you… Without a strong rhyme to step to…” – Eric B and Rakim.
In that spirit, I’m sorry I didn’t leave a strong rhyme to step to.
Some of you have written asking where I went. My only answer is I’ve been: working on this new website, moving, working with individual clients, doing some public talks, being injured, not having podcast equipment set up, lifting, writing, jiu-jitsu-ing, being injured again, more lifting, lots of laughing, oh, and catching some shut eye.
It’s been a redefining and busy many months.
So a couple of quick updates, and then an intention statement.
First, here finally is the next stage of my website. I’m really happy with it. Thank you to those who worked on it: Web Guru Alex Hillman, Designer Dan Wilt, and the WordPress coders over at Dizzain. The current categories are where I’m starting, but they are subject to change, so let me know if they work for you. And some of the forms on here are still buggy, please bear with me. Oh, and I couldn’t import all the old comments, so we’re starting from scratch on that, sorry.
Second, I am working hard on the next web project. It will be an online coaching product. I’m seeing many applications of the things I talk about in my podcast and am building a comprehensive online course to teach those concepts. I have about as many individual clients as I can have at this point (insert gratitude here), so this is what I’m building for others who can’t work with me directly. Cruise on over to my offerings page and leave an email address if you are interested in hearing more about this project. You won’t be spammed, promise.
OK so the intention statement is this: I’m going to be more active with posting and whatnot. (Or really really try to be.)
I’m taking a different attitude on the posting thing. I used to only do a podcast, and the blog entries were really just descriptions of the shows. My intention wasn’t to tell the world about Rob Scott, but rather, just things I thought interesting to teach. Now I realize that some of you may want to know a little more about me and my interests. So I plan to blog a bit more just about stuff… We’ll see how that goes. (Don’t worry, it will still be related to evolving consciousness and whatnot.)
Also, I’m planning on doing some more videos as well. They should be more interesting than my old talks (let’s hope!). I’ve spent time learning how to do this whole video thing a little better. We’ll see if the learning took.
Anyway, next up is an old interview I found with my friend Kerri Kannan that I meant to post eons ago. Stay tuned, should be out any minute.
And oh yeah, be kind to yourself, and everybody else.
A good friend of mine, Kimberly Garrison interviewed me for the Philly Fitness and Health Podcast last week. The Daily News owns the show and allowed me to post the show here in it’s entirety. This tells a little of my personal story and discusses finding higher function and overcoming obstacles.
This talk is about being in relationships with others. It describes mistakes we make that end up leaving us hurt and confused. It also describes successful relationships and what we should strive for when we come together.
Often when we enjoy being with others what we’re enjoying is the presence that arises. Being with someone can take us out of our heads, out of our thinking space, and into being. One of the mistakes we make is thinking that the person we’re with was the reason for the joy, instead of the stillness that arose. We may begin to think something like “I can’t feel this way unless they are with me.” This type of thinking can lead to feelings of dependency, and even addiction toward the other person.
We need to realize that we are responsible for our own happiness, that we can only manage our side of the street. Once we look to others to make us happy, we are in trouble. Co-dependence is something that is subtle and hard to get free of. We need to learn that our needs are deeply important, especially to foster positive relationships. Once we sacrifice ourselves, ironically something we do in an effort to better the situation, we always end up hurting the relationship.
In good relationships, we foster synergy and emergence, which is when the whole ends up greater than the parts. We learn to appreciate the differences others bring, because they are what help us learn and grow and become more than we are. We foster taking the other person’s perspective in a healthy way so we can communicate properly and understand one another with empathy and compassion. We allow the joy that others bring us to be experienced fully without being dependent on it. We do our best to bring a full healthy self to relationships instead of damaged, needy, partial selves.
We are always in relation with everything. Even when we identify ourselves as separate individuals, we are still in relationship with everything else. Let’s work hard to understand and foster healthy relationships.
Why is it so hard to make big changes in our lives? We all seem to want things to be different than they are. We’d like to lose weight, make more money, be more organized, eat better. In this talk I point out a couple of ways to help bring lasting change.
One of the ideas many people hold is that we change once. People often feel we’ll make one large switch, and then things will be different. I’ll go on a diet for a little while and THEN I’ll be the way I want. I’ll learn a new investment technique and THEN I’ll be wealthy. I’ll clean my whole house and THEN I’ll be organized. But in reality those changes rarely stick. To make changes stick we need at least two understandings.
First we need to realize that it is not one big change. It is a commitment to little choices over time that affect our lives in the long run. It’s not one diet, it’s choosing different foods over and over again. It’s not working out for two months for beach season, it’s committing to being healthy and fit going forward. And while these things may sound big and difficult, they are actually only done right now, and in small ways. Big change comes from little choices over time, not one big switch.
The other understanding we can use to make big change is to align our values with our goals. A diet is something we do temporarily. It isn’t who we want to be long term. Instead, learn to think of yourself as a healthy person, or even better, an athlete. Once you change your mindset like that, supporting that idea of yourself makes all your food choices easy. It becomes a way of life rather than a temporary fix. Rather than seeing yourself as a disorganized person who needs to be organized. See yourself as a deeply organized person. Instead of seeing yourself as a month to month pay-check person, see yourself as an investor.
By aligning our values with our goals, and realizing that it’s little changes instead of one big switch, we can make massive change in our lives, and those changes can last.
This talk is meant to suggest the importance of a regular meditation practice. The pull of the world, and the normal distractions and natural egoic self builders don’t remind us that we need to see that there is more than thought. There is experience. We can exist without our minds running all the time. We can train a state experience that fulfills us deeply and gives us many other perspectives on how to live, what is important, and how we can behave with one another. We need to practice daily however. We need to train the mind in this new way of understanding. If you are not training your mind, you may not see when you get lost again. You may not be as aware as you can be of your own belief structures that can limit and ultimately harm you.
Our world is aware for the first time of the entirety of itself. With our news media being global, we are able to see the natural horrors that occur from time to time. We also get to see, possibly too deeply, the unnatural horrors as well. Many people wonder what can we do about these things. What will help us understand these tragedies? We want to figure it out, with our minds. But I suggest that the best thing to do is to learn to put the mind down. Learn to sit in stillness.
As we see our own structures more and more, we are helping others resonate in that way. As humans become more aware of themselves, our language about what is important can change. The words presence, and stillness start to have more gravity. As we see ourselves, we see other people as well, and we might just notice when someone is in need of attention, or help. Disasters will continue to occur of course, but we can contextualize them, and perhaps not be as fearful of them because we can see that there is depth in sorrow, and joy in the ordinary. And that life is not set in any definite pattern.
If you are interested in self growth, I humbly suggest you commit to a daily meditation practice. The benefits are enormous. But more than that as a selling point, I want to say that if we talk about growing, but don’t do the work, we may still be just as lost as those that haven’t woken up at all.
