The Power Of Mind

A Guide to Developing the Self-Discipline Habit (https://zenhabits.net/self-discipline/) BY  LEO BABAUTA One of the most important life skills to develop, for those just starting out in life (and everyone else!), is the skill of self-discipline. It’s like a superpower: when I developed some self-discipline, I started exercising and eating healthier and meditating and writing more, I quit smoking and ran marathons, I started a blog and wrote books, I read more and work earlier, I decluttered and transformed my finances. I’m far from perfect, but I’ve learned a lot. But if you don’t develop self-discipline, it causes problems: health problems, distraction, procrastination, financial problems, clutter, things piling up and overwhelming you, and much more. So it’s such an important skill to develop, but most people don’t know where to start. This guide is aimed at helping you get started. I’m writing it for my kids, and for anyone else who would like to develop a superpow...

Mythology serves the purpose of illustrating larger than life ideas. Because they are larger than life, we lack a vocabulary as far as this world is concerned. We are limited in real life happenings. This is when we make up stories. The ancient greeks could not figure out how the sun came and went, so they made the story of Apollo and the sun chariot. Ancient Hindus could not figure out how life came to be, so they created Brahman. These stories are not to be taken literally, rather, they illustrate human thought. When considering the mythology of humans worldwide, we see crazy amounts of similarities. There are amazing continuities between Native American, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish thought. All have the idea of one transcendental truth. All have moral and ethical restraints their people must adhere to. All serve the purpose of making human life eternal. We can look at this one of two ways. The first is that there is a Universal truth that humans have d...

When I was younger, I didn’t know for a fact that time was relative, but understood it intuitively. I would always think about how fast time would move for me when I was sick v.s. sleeping. How in one case an hour could feel like a week and the other an hour could feel like seconds. Then I would wonder about other people and their relative experience of time. Obviously everyone couldn’t experience time in the same way, so I would think about where people would be in time, based on their experiences. If I was in recess while a friend in detention, I would reason that their present moment is different from mine. In these cases it would be pretty obvious to me that they were in a different place in time from me entirely, possibly a few hours behind my time. If someone wasn’t even in the same moment as me, how could I have any chance to interact or connect with them. Think about people who have experienced something like war, with all of its atrocities and horror. Could someone from the c...

I am reading “The Charisma Myth” by Olivia Fox Cabane, and she spends the first few chapters (I am on chapter 5), describing how presence and body language are the basis of charisma. Hearing this makes perfect sense to me, considering my journey. I used to be pretty insecure and still deal with depression. There was nearly constant fatigue and self doubt which sometimes bordered on self hate. During this time, life felt pretty hard, and I looked for any way to ease the suffering. This is when meditation, mindfulness, yoga, spirituality, and conscious construction of my life became a central part of my life. Becoming conscious changed the ways I looked at life. Living was no longer composed of individual events vaguely connected to one another, instead I began to see a vast network of cause and effect complete with blurred boundaries of supposedly separate entities. The reality of an interconnected existence finally revealed itself. Once this reality became clear to me, I appli...

There is a state of transcendence which many athletes have the good fortune to experience. In this state, you come closer to yourself than you ever have. Lose yourself to find yourself. This transcendence can be imagined as a blissful flow state, and I have experienced it in multiple different sports including weightlifting, yoga, bouldering, capoeira, and BJJ. It requires you to push past the furthest place you have ever been, beat both mental and physical fatigue, and step outside of your comfort zone, owning every second of it. In a society lacking of ritualistic transitions from childhood to adulthood, these transcendental moments are rites of passage (reference “King, Warrior, Magician, Warrior” 1 ). Put simply, redefine your limits and Shatter your self image! What happens when this transcendental state is reached? We break out of the narrative which was constructed largely without your consent. Emerson (reference “The Spiritual Emerson” 3 ) says “infancy conforms t...