Posts Tagged ‘personal development articles’

By Seamus Anthony

What follows is the massively-inspired, half-drunk process of me trying to finally define what “Rebel Zen” means in a slogan …

Rebel Zen: It’s not about being perfect – it’s about being alive.

or

Exploring what it means to be alive…

or maybe

Exploring what it means to be human…

or

… and the Glorious Art of Being Imperfect

Yes! That’s it!

Rebel Zen and the Glorious Art of Being Imperfect!

‘Cos to me that is the point – it is about what it means to be a human – warts and all.

What it feels like to be alive; the search for meaning, for authenticity, what it feels like.

The very thing artists strive to express – musicians, poets, madmen.

Forsaking fantasies of perfection – Zen as in “being here now”, whether that feels good or not.

What it feels like to be a human being, with all the inherent imperfection and beauty and baggage that comes part-and-parcel with it it.

What IT means.

THIS.

What THIS all means.

Meaning – and the absence of meaning.

The glorious, never-ending, futile, wonderful search for meaning and our compulsion to look forward when it, this, the answers are here now.

But they aren’t here now at all. They are elusive, or we would find already and stop searching.

The continual paradox of apparent meaninglessness coupled with our insatiable desire for meaning.

The Yin and Yang play-off of ‘Meaningless Life’ and ‘Awareness’.

What THIS feels like – and the validity of this experience.

This is what Rebel Zen means to me – if it must be defined – that we live, impermanently, meaninglessly, and that – surely – THIS is okay…

…but somehow it’s not,

….but somehow it is,

…and on and on without resolution …

Without resolution but with an aching wonder, a beauty, a Love…

… a dream.

…. a dream framed by razors and barbed wire

… and then framed again with clouds of forgiveness and Love …

… and on and on and on without resolution.

Until … ?

Yes … I bloody LOVE it … Rebel Zen … is

The Glorious Art of Being Imperfect

By Seamus Anthony

If you are anything like me then you are sometimes a messy blob of anxiety, stress and over-imaginative worry.

Between you and me, I think we should get over ourselves already and get on with enjoying our lives while we still have the chance. Easier said than done? Here are some unconventional ways to help you live a little:

Take Some Time Out To Really Imagine The Worst

There’s a lot of advice out there about setting aside some time to visualize all the good things that you’d like to come into your life – you know – the whole Law of Attraction thing.

Have you ever actually watched The Secret?

I mean – pluh-eeez … as IF!

I think far better advice is to throw out your superstitious hokey-pokey and get real. Spend some time conjuring up all the worst things that could happen. I do this sometimes and I find that by naming my fears I somehow strip them of their power.

I think ‘what if “that” happened?’ And ‘what if ‘THAT” happened’. After a little while of doing this I just get fear-fatigue and I realize there is nothing to do except A) take all reasonable precautions, B) hope for the best and C) relax and get on with enjoying the moment as best I can.

Oh yeah – and in case you are worried that by focussing on the worst you will magically attract the very scenarios you want to avoid – put that out of your mind – it’s woo-woo nonsense.

Seriously – that’s like worrying that airline safety teams are in fact inviting distaster by going over all the possible malfunctions that might beset an aircraft. If those guys didn’t do exactly that there is NO WAY I would get in a plane!

Just Do Things When and If You Feel Like It

One day you’ll be dead – and will it matter that you did or did not have the self-discipline to power through all those boring to-do list items that really sucked? Probably not.

Go Out and Get Pissed

Or go bungy jumping or whatever. My point is, you gotta just let it all hang out and be a hairy beast for a while every now and then.

I was at this (very nice) guy’s house the other day and he was proudly telling me how he never drinks very much and how he has a nice new white carpet and a nice new beige car . And I kid you not – his trousers were beige too.

Lovely guy mind you, I really like him – but for God’s sake – do you want to be like that? Are you already? ‘Cos being boring is fine some of the time – even most of the time – but for the love of Pete you gotta have some fun sometimes!

So get amongst it, I say. Hang out with the hairy people for a night. Live a little.

And beware of becoming one of the beige people, take it from Billy Connolly.

Dwell In The Angst

This is similar to focussing on the worst that can happen but this is more about focussing on the bad feelings that are messing with you.

I accidently came across this liberating technique way back when I was first experimenting with meditation. I was trying to establish a routine of meditating every day whether I felt like it or not. Well, on one particular day I certainly did not feel like it: I was so depressed and anxious that I could barely think (I was partying very hard at the time, even for me, and this was leaving me strapped out).

Nevertheless, I sat down to try and meditate anyway but I couldn’t get into it because I was squirming with an angst that was so acute it was manifesting itself physically: I literally felt like I was crawling out of my skin.

I felt like giving up and lighting a joint. Even though I knew that this wouldn’t really help much, I was just about to get up and do that when a “voice” said to me “Stay and dwell in the angst”.

Listen To The Voices In Your Head

Now I don’t know about you, but when I hear “voices” I listen up good. Maybe they lose their impact if they never stop, but thankfully my voices keep to themselves most of the time, so I just went with it and tried to “dwell in the angst”.

At first it was horrible. I focussed all my attention on how horribly stressed and anxious I felt, and for a few minutes it was almost more than I could bear. I  was in tears (and I usually find it very hard to cry properly).

But then all of a sudden the angst just lifted. It was gone and I felt quite calm and relaxed – quite fine.

Somehow by listening to the voices in my head and dwelling in the angst like I was told, I worked through the stress and anxiety that was knocking me around. Instead of pushing it down with more drugs or distraction, I acknowledged and paid attention to how I felt. To my surprise, that was pretty much all that was actually required to quell the bad feelings.

So there you have it – no doubt the sanest advice you’ve ever read: Imagine the worst, get pissed, be irresponsible, listen to voices in your head and meditate on feeling really crap. Regulation stuff really.

Photo by StuartPilbrow

Here’s three great personal development articles that are worth a look:

How to Climb Up the Ladder of Healing and Growth

Ari Koinuma gives us a short and a long version of this post. Having the attention span of a gnat, I went for the shorter version first but in fact the full essay makes more sense (although if I were Ari, I’d steer clear of calling something an essay, makes the schoolboy in me want to run a mile).

The concept he is exploring is that we are at any one time set to a default state-of-mind that appears on a scale of what he terms a “healing/growth spectrum”. This idea will be great for systematic minds that like classifications, numbers and graphs. That’s the complete opposite of how my brain works, but still I really enjoyed this post. Ari has good storytelling skills and the guts to reveal information about his personal journeys. And as a new father, I was especially interested in the idea of young children starting out at a fairly positive level, then moving up or down according to what cards life deals them. Definitely worth a look.

12 Techniques to Stop Worrying

This article over at PickTheBrain.com caught my eye because, despite my swaggering bravado, I am in fact a chronic worry wart.

Writer Cindy Holbrook runs us through some stats about worry which do a pretty good job convincing me that there’s not that much to worry about after all. Then we get the list of suggestions to help you stop worrying. I totally agree with most of them, especially to “get support” as I have found that discussing my concerns seems to dissolve a lot of worry. (I might add that this took me up until about 6 months ago to discover as being a typical male and all, I used to just clam up and tough it out. Not recommended.)

I also agree that gratitude or, as Cindy puts it, counting your blessings, is a fantastic way to change the mental channel you’re tuned into.

I wonder however, about the recommendations to “distract yourself” and to “get busy”. Sounds a bit like running from the issue. But then again, maybe it’s actually a good piece of advice and I am just a crazy opinionated hack!

I would add two suggestions:

One which is kind of hinted at in the first tip to “prepare for the worst” is to ask yourself, “what’s the worst thing that can happen?”. Usually it’s not that bad and if it is really, really bad then there’s usually not a whole lot can be done about it anyway.

Two is stop listening to the bullshit that mainstream journalists are constantly bombarding us with – it’s an unhealthy mental diet that plants seeds of worry and stress. (What’s with those guys anyway? Oh, that’s right, they’re arseholes, nearly forgot.)

Wilderness Shangri-la

Ok firstly I should admit that this is the latest post at a website built and managed by me and Steve (who also runs this blog with me). But it’s not ours, LivingNow are our client.

So full disclosure out of the way, it’s a lovely article. Admittedly it’s a bit hippy for Rebel Zen, especially the lame title, but it reflects a very pleasant state of mind that I experience quite often but (unlike violent rage) I don’t usually find the need to express: calm, peaceful and connected to nature.

Writer Steven Katsineris does an awesome job of describing how beautiful the Tasmanian wilderness truly must be. It’s just so important that we don’t screw these gifts up with our selfish ways, isn’t it?

I am actually off for my first visit to Tasmania early next year (about time too as it’s only a short flight from Melbourne, Australia). This article got me all freshly excited about it!

Anyway, there’s three great posts worth a look – I’m off to meditate before bed. Enjoy!

Seamus Anthony
Click here to get the first Rebel Zen e-book “Curly’s Law” – it’s free!

By Seamus Anthony Ennis

It’s just my opinion, and I have no idea what I am talking about, but you – yes, you – have absolutely no clue what the hell is going on.

Yes, you heard me, and that goes for your guru, coach, expert or teacher also.

You see, sometimes when I am at barbecues, beer comfortably resting on my belly, paper plate piled high on my knee, the subject comes up that I write personal development articles and, for better or worse, I cringe. Why? Because the first thing that happens, at least in my mind, is that people look at me and think “Well, what the hell does he know that I don’t? He’s no guru; look at that blob of mayonnaise on his beard! And isn’t that the guy who drank a couple too many at Jo’s party last fortnight and made a fool of himself? Personal development writer indeed – hmmph!”

And the truth is they are right. I don’t know diddly. But neither do ‘they’ and neither, my friend, do you.

You might have chosen to believe certain things, and these beliefs are most likely an integral part of your sense of personal identity. In fact they are probably very useful in keeping you from just collapsing under the weight of a total existential breakdown, but nevertheless…

You. Don’t. Know. Anything. About. Anything.

Believing something is not the same as knowing something. One is a choice, the other is a certainty, and in this life there are no certainties.

Everything you think you know is all just your own unique perspective and is completely unprovable as ultimate truth.

I once saw that great, mad, rambling comic Billy Connolly expound his view on this. Minus a few expletives, he said:

“We are part of something enormous that’s too big for us too understand. … We’ve been looking through the wrong end of the telescope for God … See those wee things that live in ponds … they don’t have a clue that we exist, because we’re too big for them … Well, there’s something too huge for us. We’re the leg of a chair. We’re a cup of tea. We’re something dead simple.”

In other words we just see this little circle of possibility that just doesn’t give us a particularly insightful view of the big picture whatsoever. We are too big for the little water bugs to comprehend, and that, my little insect friends, is our lot too. If you’ve ever seen that email that goes around comparing the relative size of the planets to each other and then to the sun, and then our sun to the other even bigger suns out there until planet Earth is so little it can’t even be seen on the computer screen anymore, then you’ll know what Billy means. We are so, so tiny in the grand scheme of things that we are conceited to think that we will ever understand our Universe …

… and herein lies our freedom.

(”Everybody! Follow me!” screams Connolly, doing a Nazi salute and marching off, “We’ll come back for your valuables later!”)

But seriously, given that you will soon be dead, and given that you can’t be expected to understand God or the big picture, there is simply no good reason why you shouldn’t dream ‘big’ (which will always be comparatively small) and, to reclaim a corporately-hijacked cliché, just do it.

I Don’t Know What I’m Talking About

I don’t know what I’m talking about of course, but in my opinion our mission is to help to raise the vibration of the universe just a little bit. To make a positive contribution. Now, this contribution, even if you became the single most important human being in the history of the world, will by default always be tiny in the grand scheme of things, but in the earthly context of this and subsequent generations, you can help to make our world a better place, and this can bring you (and others) happiness.

Far be it for me to bark orders, but there’s no point trying to understand the Universe, because that is a waste of time, and there’s no point wasting our lives chasing security, because there simply is no security. Soon, very soon, you will be dead and whatever happens after that is anybody’s guess. So be free. Do what you want. Dream a dream and have a go. Sure you’ll need to consider practicalities, and you’ll need to decide whether or not you really do actually want the pressure and risk that comes with being a working astronaut or high-wire trapeze artist, but don’t let others put you off by telling you what-is-what, because those people, be they priest, parent, spouse, whoever, have absolutely no clue – and neither do you.

If you ponder it long enough, I hope you will see the ultimate freedom that lies in this fact: No matter how hard you peer up above you, you will never really know what the heck is actually going in outside of your little muddy puddle, so you are free do what you feel.

My only sub-clause is this: The one apparently apparent fact in this life is that doing good is infinitely more satisfying for any sane person than doing evil. So please don’t use this article as an excuse to do something horrible. After all, it’s not like I have the foggiest idea what I am on about.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and find a napkin to wipe the mayonnaise – and forty seven thousand, three hundred and eighty nine tiny doomed critters – off my beard. Good day to you.

This article was first published in print in Living Now Publishing’s DaretoDream magazine (March 2008, Australia)