Bitesize Wisdom For Busy People
By Ivan Campuzano
Hello and welcome to my channel. My name is Ivan and I like sharing transformative ideas rooted in the Wisdom Traditions in a simple down to earth way while working to evolve them further.
Bitesize Wisdom For Busy PeopleJan 01, 2019
Where Attention Goes Energy Flows (Bitesize Wisdom #162)
#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization #nondualawareness #nonduality #advaita
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here:http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom
Hello, I'm Ivan: travel junkie, blogger, teacher, a student of life. Welcome to my little home on the net, where I hope to share ideas and insights to help you lead a deeply fulfilling life.
This is a journey of discovering both inner and outer freedom. Will you join me on this quest towards ultimate freedom? I write and talk about my experiences in: self-development, psychology, traveling full-time, living abroad, location independence, meditation, yoga, lucid dreaming, entrepreneurship, lifestyle business, language learning, and how to be in the now.
Learning To Be More Considerate - The Wisdom of Sir Francis Bacon (Bitesize Wisdom #161)
#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealizationToday's quote is by Sir Francis Bacon, “In charity, there is no excess”
If you are on a self-development or spiritual journey, much of that journey at times can seem selfish as you are mainly focused on yourself. This can be ok because in order to truly help others we must be able to help ourselves first.
This will also help us to relate to other people’s struggles and then we can be in a better position to help by having some personal experience and insight into their situation.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom
Finding Your Key To Happiness (Bitesize Wisdom #160)
#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization
I think it’s safe to say that most of us will spend our whole lives searching. Searching for love, money, happiness, success, and many other worldly desires.
This search takes place mainly in our external world, a search that leads us further away from what we actually want and from who we really are. We feel that once we attain these worldly desires that life will be grand, everything will be ok, that we will be deeply fulfilled.
I think that many of us deep down know that things like money, becoming famous, becoming powerful, will be really nice but that ultimately it will not give us the peace of mind and deep fulfillment that we crave.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom
How To Become a Leader: What Donald Trump Taught The World (Bitesize Wisdom #159)
#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization
The title of today’s video is “How To Become a Leader: What Trump Taught The World”, but it’s actually based on an article I wrote a long time ago, which was “How To Become a Leader: What Hitler Taught The World”. It’s not my intent to discuss politics here, but if Donald Trump has done anything well, I think many of us will agree that he did a great job of implementing the main ideas that I discuss in the post.
The purpose of this video is to raise some awareness among people who would like to be a leader of some sort, to make you aware of the responsibility you will have, and to question what your true motives are and the possible consequences of your message. To possibly re-think what it means to be a leader. Do you even need to be a leader?
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom
How To See Like a Genius (Bitesize Wisdom #158)
#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization
Today's quote is by William James, “Genius...means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitable way.” If you have watched some of my videos you will know how much I stress and talk about the faculty of attention. If you are new to my channel check out my video where I give an overview of the 3 levels of attention. I’ll put some helpful links in the description box below.
Understanding The Three Levels of Attention For Our Self-Development: https://youtu.be/n-cTUil01Bg
How To Really Understand Yourself Through Proper Self-observation: https://youtu.be/2fmLjPpOZAM
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom
Developing Presence 103: Learning To Recognize and Increase Sensitive Energy (Bitesize Wisdom #157)
Today we’ll talk about increasing our ability of working with our sensitive energies, of getting more acquainted with recognizing sensation for what it truly is.
With learning to relax the body, emotions, and thoughts we are laying the foundation for our journey into our inner space. Our ability to perceive what’s going on inside us becomes more acute and vivid. When our body is no longer wasting its vital energy on unnecessary tension and strains the energy that keeps us in relationship with our bodies is naturally accumulated. Most people never advance on their self-development path because they simply don’t have the energy because our already low supply is wasted through various unconscious leaks we have developed like negative emotions and bodily tensions. If we were video game characters, at the end of our day our power bar would always be in the red. We just don’t have the resources to pursue more lofty spiritual goals.
Through our practice of deliberate sensing, we learn to come into contact and become grounded in our bodies through this sensitive energy.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom
Developing Presence 102: Relaxing The Body and Releasing Its Tensions Further (Bitesize Wisdom #156)
Living From Presence: How To Really Enter The Present Moment: https://youtu.be/-Px1k1XLJ2A
Developing Presence 101: Relaxing The Body and Releasing Its Tensions: https://youtu.be/Yj6x1VzN874
Recently I made a couple of videos about living from presence, If you haven’t checked them out, I'll put the links in the description box. In the first video, I talked about the importance of grounding our attention in the raw sensation of the body, in the 2nd video I talked about the next step of learning to relax the entire body to get our energies flowing more freely, today we’ll talk about furthering our ability to calm our body.
Once we have gotten acquainted with learning to use our attention to progressively relax our whole body, we will try to go into a more thorough deeper relaxation. Our self-development journey is one where we learn to go from the gross to the very subtle.
The tensions at the coarser physical level of our body are usually the easiest for us to identify and to let go of. The next more subtle and deeper level of tensions that we need to relax is that of our thoughts, emotions, and will.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom
Life Advice From The Stoic Epictetus To Overcome Fear and Agitation (Bitesize Wisdom #155)
Today's quote is by Epictetus, “For if a person shifts their caution to their own reasoned choices and the acts of those choices, they will at the same time gain the will to avoid, but if they shift their caution away from their own reasoned choices to things not under their control, seeking to avoid what is controlled by others, they will then be agitated, fearful, and unstable.””
This quote highlights an idea we've discussed before, which is the importance of creating a life aim for ourselves. A long last aim that can serve as our guide and always point in us in the right direction for our life. Since my channel focuses on self-development and becoming more conscious, increasing our awareness can serve as a broad and long-lasting aim for our life. Anything that helps us move in the direction of becoming more mindful and aware is good and anything that takes us away from that aim we would consider bad.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom
Cultivating Patience: The Key To a Happy and Blissful Life (Bitesize Wisdom #154)
They say patience is a virtue, and it truly is the number one quality to cultivate in our lives because it ties in and is a by-product of all our self-development work. Real patience is the result of our genuine inner work, of us, becoming more conscious.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Follow us on Instagram: www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom
Developing Presence 101: Relaxing The Body and Releasing Its Tensions (Bitesize Wisdom #153)
Recently I made a video about living from presence, If you haven’t checked it out here: https://youtu.be/-Px1k1XLJ2A In that video, I gave a brief overview of how our spiritual journey is one where we go from the gross to the very subtle, and the importance of learning to ground our attention in the energy of sensation in our bodies in order to grow and feed our presence.
Today I’ll get a little bit into discussing the initial stage of developing contact with our body, with our body presence which is an essential beginning foundation to help us go deeper and higher into the subtle energies of our inner space. Developing our inner energy body of sensation will act as a container to attract and hold the next higher energy of consciousness.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom
Spreading Joy: How To Cheer Yourself Up (Bitesize Wisdom #152)
Today's quote is by Mark Twain, “The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.”
We're living in crazy times right now, and we all could use a little cheering up. Unfortunately, modern life in many parts of the world has encouraged more selfish ways of living, of being. It’s a dog eat dog kind of world out there. Which has become a big source for stress and unhappiness for many.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom
Living From Presence: How To Really Enter The Present Moment (Bitesize Wisdom #151)
Today our topic is on living from Presence.
Our whole self-development journey is one towards a deeper understanding and embodiment of presence. The more presence we invite into our life, the more our life comes alive. Living with little presence our life just slips through our hands and passes us by. We become passive participants in our life and don’t experience it fully.
Presence means to be here and now grounded in our life, grounded in our bodies, through not only the sensory experience but also aware of ourselves doing whatever it may be as we are doing it. We fully inhabit our bodies and actions by being an active participant in our life.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom
The Importance of Being Thankful During a Pandemic/Crisis (Bitesize Wisdom #150)
Today's quote is by the Buddha,
“Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.”
I know it seems as if the sky is falling every day as we hear non-stop about all the different crises going on around the world. Especially if you are someone who has been directly impacted by everything going on. It can be difficult to feel thankful right now. But as the Buddha said, as long we’re breathing and live to fight another day, we should remain thankful. It’s all a matter of perspective, no matter how bad things may seem we can always find something to be thankful for.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom
Living More Consciously: The Importance of Right Aim and Mastering Attention (Bitesize Wisdom #149)
#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization
I have spoken before on the importance of making an aim for oneself in respect to our self-development work. Our aim is what keeps us on the right track. After careful and sincere self-observation, of being objectively mindful of our behavior we should be able to identify areas that we need to work on in order to progress on our journey of becoming more conscious. This data helps us to formulate an aim for our self-development work. For example, you may discover that feelings of jealousy are especially damaging to you, so your aim is to understand and overcome them. Today we will talk a little bit about understanding where our aim comes from and that it can come from a right or wrong place within ourselves.
We need to have a deep and clear comprehension of our aim, of ourselves, of our attention because we may have an aim that is right but be coming from a wrong place or we may have an aim that is wrong but be coming from a right place in us.
In order to understand where our aim is coming from we need to have an intimate relationship with our attention and how it relates to the main centers in our body.
Recommended videos:
1. Balancing and Understanding Our Intellectual, Emotional, Instinctive Brains: https://youtu.be/WePYyrVbFQU
2. Increasing Self-Awareness of Our Three Brains: Head, Heart, and Gut: https://youtu.be/dyIX9_wBxss
3. How To Not Be A Smartphone Zombie: Increasing Awareness and Expanding Consciousness: https://youtu.be/f9H1p6IW3gs
4. Understanding The Three Levels of Attention For Our Self-Development: https://youtu.be/n-cTUil01Bg
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Living Like You Really Mean It: Being Present Here And Now (Bitesize Wisdom #148)
#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization
All of us have heard the importance of learning to be present, of living in the now, but how many of us are actually really living it, how many of us really understand what that means or how to do it…
Today I’ll briefly touch upon this by emphasizing that we need to live like we really mean it. It means we need to learn to identify the silent presence behind all experiences and to live by having our intention in whatever it is that we may be doing. Living from a place of presence we do not let life just happen to us, or to let this present moment go by unnoticed. We are here in an integrated way, fully and vividly as our attention and intention. We are in our life living it as it unfolds.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
It's Your Choice To Be Negative or Not (Bitesize Wisdom #147)
#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization
Today we will continue our discussion on negative emotions, specifically that you have the choice or right to not be negative.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
The Art of Manifesting: How To Pray For Better Days (Bitesize Wisdom #146)
In recent years due to the success of the Secret, the law of attraction has enjoyed a mass revival. Although it was good that the focus was generally on being more positive, it lacked a comprehensive understanding and also gave birth to many negative outcomes due to this. I Instead of helping people become more free, it subtly enslaved many people as well by enabling them to become more egotistical and the results promised did not materialize for most. Peoples hopes and dreams are being exploited to the max in this age of social media by internet marketers turned self-improvement gurus.
A big part of that is that the teachings are so watered down in an effort to reach a big market and it focused only on the intellectual thinking process so it made people even more lopsided by neglecting the development of the other essential parts of our Being.
In the Secret, they rebranded something that has been taught for thousands of years as if they were sharing something revolutionary, something new. So today we will briefly go into the art of prayer, which is the original method to manifest in our material reality and some of the key ideas and understanding missing from a lot of mainstream ideas around the law of attraction.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Purifying Our Emotions To Raise The Level of Our Being (Bitesize Wisdom #145)
On our journey of self-development, one of the key themes that you will find across all spiritual paths is that of purification...and specifically of the purification of our emotions.
The emotions that we have picked up through life, that are now part of our false personality, is what keeps us at the level of being that we are currently at.
False personality is all that we have acquired from life, all our conditioning from the external environment that has shaped us. False because it’s not intrinsic to our real nature. These emotions that we learn from the imitation of those around us, are mainly negative.
For an explanation of self-observation check out episode #32: https://youtu.be/p7UZtW0nMmo
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
How You Can Use Your Habits To Become More Conscious and Live In The Now (Bitesize Wisdom #144)
Today we will talk a little bit about how we can use our habits to help us in our self-development work. In trying to change ourselves to live more consciously we need all the energy we can get. Much of our energy is spent through all the automatic habits that we have developed, and through all our various energy leaks such as indulging in negative emotions, at the end of the day we simply don’t have enough energy left for our self-development work. So we need to become less mechanical, more mindful, and to stop all of our unnecessary energy leaks.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Energy Breathing: A Simple Exercise To Grow Your Energy Body and Presence (Bitesize Wisdom #143)
Energy is all around you. On our self-development journey, one of the primary tools that we use to gain self-knowledge is our attention. We develop a deep and intimate relationship with attention. Which is just an aspect of our true Will. Not what most people take their Will to be which is a constantly changing little “i”, the will of our conditioned personality.
When our attention is refined enough it may be possible for us to be able to perceive and to draw in the energy in the air. This gives you a little clue into the real meaning of “inspiration”. The Latin word “spiritus” means both breath and soul. All of the other major traditions tell us that the air contains special energies. From the Taoist traditions, it is known as ch’i. From Yoga and Hindu philosophy, it is known as prana. Ruach, from Hebrew, is the breath of life. And pneuma is the ancient Greek word for breath and also related to the spirit.
So today we will be talking about the importance of collecting the vital energy in the air for our inner work.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Simple Exercise To Think On a Higher Scale and Activate Your Higher Mind (Bitesize Wisdom #142)
We live in a culture of me, me, me! We all occupy a very small part of the world, we live in our own tiny bubble that doesn’t make any real contact with the greater world. It is important for us to try to conceive of something greater than ourselves. To extend beyond our own little bubble, and in doing so new vistas will open up to us.
For example, if all of us could every day upon waking up try to realize the fact that our time on this earth in the grand scheme of things is actually very short, it might make not only an intellectual impression but also an emotional one and that could possibly change the way we see the world, it would change how we live our lives. We need also need to develop our relative understanding. This is because everything is interconnected so to understand anything we must try to understand some aspects of the whole in order to know the part.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Developing Real Patience With Ourselves And The World (Bitesize Wisdom #141)
#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization
Today's quote is by Saadi Shirazi, “Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy.”
In a world that seems to be exponentially moving faster, developing real patience will help us to navigate life much more intelligently.
How can we develop real patience? Real patience can be a by-product of our sincere self-development work like our meditation practices and our active self-observation. On my channel, you always hear me talking about learning to objectively observe ourselves. Where the goal is simply learning to observe and witness the contents of the mind in a more objective manner. This entails learning not to react to our unconscious tendencies.
Check out this video for a more thorough description on what I mean by self-observation: https://youtu.be/f9H1p6IW3gs
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
The Importance of Being Kind To Yourself and Others (Bitesize Wisdom #140)
Today's quote is by Henry James, “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind”
I think we can all agree that our world can always use a little more kindness. Today, I just want to provide a little gentle reminder to deliberately be more kind as you go about your day. If you are trying to be kind to others, do it with the attitude that you will be kind to others without the expectation that they will then be kind to you. The reason being that creating expectations of how other people should behave according to our ideas only sets us for disappointment. Also, by being kind to others even if they don’t reciprocate doesn’t matter because we still benefit from cultivating this powerful and beneficial attitude. Out of kindness, many other positive qualities will emerge. Patience is another quality that you will also be cultivating.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Thought = Time: Discovering Our Timeless Source (Bitesize Wisdom #139)
#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization
We live in a world that is dominated by thought. Thought has allowed us to create a materially comfortable world. It’s allowed some amazing inventions to come to life, but at the same time has enslaved us as evidenced by the levels of unhappiness and depression that people deal with despite that the common man has more wealth then even Kings had not long ago. On the quest towards inner freedom, it is essential that we come to an intimate understanding of thought. That we question it. It’s very difficult for many of us because thought is so close and invisible to us that we just take it for granted. We just know we have it, we get so wrapped up in it, that we end up deriving a majority of our sense of self, of our identity from it.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Love Yourself First And Everything Else Falls Into Place (Bitesize Wisdom #138)
I think if you ask someone if they love themselves, a big majority will say that for the most part they do. The reality though is that many people only love the ideas, the images that they have of who they think they are. These images are very precious to us. They give us a sense of identity. If I have an image of myself of being an honest hardworking person, and someone comes along and says that I’m a lazy lier, I will feel attacked, I will feel threatened. But what in me feels threatened? What is it in me that reacts? It’s the conceptual image itself and my identification with it. But is that image really who I am? The problem is that most people have a case of mistaken identity, we’re in love with our false personality. Only what is false feels the need to defend itself, to fight for its survival. What’s true doesn’t need to prove anything.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom
Uncovering And Breaking Unconscious Tendencies That Keep Us Stuck (Bitesize Wisdom #137)
“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” - George Bernard Shaw
Today I want to touch on a few ideas that this quote inspired. While in our bodies we meet reality in a threefold way. Which is to say that we can only think, feel, and sense the world around us. And based on our own individual faculties and capacities will perceive the world in our own unique way.
Our lives from the moment we are born until we die is spent reacting to external stimuli. As we react to these external stimuli, we develop certain patterns and habits of thinking, feeling, and sensing. As time goes on, we increasingly become more conditioned. People, if they don’t take their development into their own hands, will become set in their ways.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Pursue Goals That Touch Your Mind, Body, And Spirit (Bitesize Wisdom #87)
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: freedomfromtheknown.com
Learning To Appreciate The Simple Things In Life (Bitesize Wisdom #136)
#selfrealization #selfdevelopment #enlightenment #conciousness #spirituality #nonduality
Today's quote is a Chinese Proverb. The proverb is “The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth.” One of the big ironies of life is that most of us seem to go on missing what’s right in front of us, right under our noses. We are all chasing something which we deem more satisfying, more pleasurable, then our current moment to moment experience. To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
How To Really Increase Awareness of Your Body: Start By Setting Small Goals (Bitesize Wisdom #135)
If you are trying to be more aware of your body, just pick one thing, one physical manifestation and work on it until you master it. For example, let’s take your tone of voice. Learn to be aware of it as if you were simply listening to a stranger. Be an alert witness, that doesn’t judge what he observes. It’s important that we make no attempt to modify our behaviors, we are simply seeing and gathering objective data about ourselves. Work on this until you can be consciously aware of your tone of voice all day.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
The Law of Three: The 3 Forces of Manifestation (Bitesize Wisdom #134)
The law of 3 is an ancient teaching known to all the great wisdom traditions of the past. In esoteric Christianity is was known as the trinity, in Indian teachings, they were expressed in the 3 Gunas of tamas, rajas, and sattva.
The law of three can be used to explain how all manifestations happen at both the material and psychological level. It is the 3 forces of creation. We will talk a little bit about why this important for us at the practical level. So for every manifestation or event 3 forces must meet for its actualization.
These 3 forces can be described as the active force, passive force, and neutralizing force. Or as the father, son, and the holy spirit in Christianity or Rajas for active, Tamas for passive, and Sattva for neutralizing force. These forces are found in the outer cosmos as well as the microcosmos within man. These are the creative forces of our cosmos.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Learning How To Make Good Decisions In Life (Bitesize Wisdom #133)
So today I want to talk a little bit about how we can make the best choices for our life. In order to make good sound decisions, we need to become balanced and see and act from a place of presence. As I have mentioned many times on my channel most people have their center of gravity in either their intellect, their emotions, or their bodies.
If you make decisions while solely being identified with only one of your centers you will only be acting with a third of your potential. Each center possesses its own unique form of intelligence. In order to make good sound decisions, we need to be able to access all the information that is available to us. When we learn to become more balanced in our thinking, feeling, and sensing, our centers will then be able to work efficiently and communicate with each other. They can work as an integrated and harmonious whole as a result of our self-development work.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Reconnecting With Old Friends And Reconnecting With Our True Selves (Bitesize Wisdom #132)
Throughout life we have people who can come into and are a part of our lives, then due to various circumstances are out of our life. We really need to appreciate all the people who come into our lives for however long it may be. We need to make an effort to restore, renew, revive. reclaim, and redeem our relationships.
In life relationships are everything. And now in our modern day life loneliness and lack of meaningful relationships are an epidemic for so many. People’s lives are literally being cut short.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
The Importance of Making Effort on The Spiritual and Self-development Path (Bitesize Wisdom #131)
Today's topic is on Effort. Specifically, the importance of effort on our self-development journey. When we have ceased to make efforts, we can say that we are now psychologically asleep and drifting through life. Although it may seem that we are not drifting because we are being active in the world, but we are so identified, so immersed in worldly pursuits that we forget everything relating to our inner journey.
Our inner journey depends on conscious effort, it depends on us constantly remembering our work and the aim we have created for ourselves. We must constantly remember why we have even embarked on our self-development journey in the first place.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Learning To Follow The Wisdom of The Heart: Activating Your Real Intuition (Bitesize Wisdom #130)
Today's quote of the day is by Norman Vincent Peale.
The quote is “Throw your heart over the fence and the rest will follow.”
Today I want to take a few minutes to talk about the importance of learning to drop from your head-space, from our conscious thinking mind, into our heart space. Getting in tune with our inner knowing, the wisdom of the heart.
In today’s society thought, has become all important, we have become too head oriented. Most people derive their entire sense of self from their thinking, from the little voice in their heads.
The problem with this is that thought is essentially just conditioned memory. In time life seems duller, we zap the aliveness out of life because we are seeing the world through the filters of the past.
Following your heart and intuition. Check out my self-development articles at: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Transform The World By Transforming Yourself (Bitesize Wisdom #129)
We're going to talk about about how in order to transform the world we need to transform the individual, for the individual is what truly exists. Society is a mental construct, show me this thing we call society?
To transform oneself requires self-knowledge. Without knowing what we really are, there won’t be any foundation for clear thinking, without knowing who you are there cannot be any meaningful transformation.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Learning To Love Your Real Self: Going Beyond Who You Think You Are (Bitesize Wisdom #128)
Today's quote is “I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.” Most people understand that unless you love yourself, you cannot really love anyone else. If we don’t have a loving relationship with our very own self, we will project any of our own weaknesses unto the other person and end up sabotaging and limiting our relationship with another.
It seems basic, that we should learn to love our own selves and on the surface many people believe or think they love themselves but their behavior will show otherwise. And what most people call love is a superficial identification with a conceptual “me” which just makes us more egoistic and separate from others. We can be sure that Donald Trump is in love with Donald Trump.
So what keeps us from loving ourselves? The short answer is ignorance. We simply don’t have a deep and proper understanding of who or what we are. We only know who we think we are. Thought is memory, and our memories are conditioned through our experiences with life. Our identity becomes an object to us. We then derive our sense of identity from our thinking conscious mind. But who are really are is the silent subject of all experiencing, that from which thought arises, the space like awareness from which all the content of the mind arises. We get caught up and lost in the minds content losing sight of the subject.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
How To Stop Drifting Through Life By Making Conscious Efforts (Bitesize Wisdom #127)
If you are someone who has embarked on a journey of self-knowledge, of self-development and have found yourself to stop making any efforts in relation to your higher aim, we can say that you are now drifting in life.
You have fallen asleep at the wheel, your mechanical tendencies have you under their spell, and as a result, you have forgotten all about your inner work. Being asleep, we are said to be drifting because we live a reactionary life. We are led this way and that way by the situations and circumstances we encounter in life.
Our journey on the progressive path towards self-realization depends on effort, and not just any effort, but effort of a special kind. Effort of the general kind is mechanical in nature. This kind of effort is what life makes us do. If it rains we need to pull out an umbrella, this is what I mean by mechanical effort. Through these general efforts, we adapt to life.
Conscious effort means effort that is not necessary and required by life. Life does not cause it or is the source of it.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
How To Be The King of Your Inner Castle (Bitesize Wisdom #126)
In order to have this higher point of view, we need to learn to recognize and become established in our thought-free awareness. Much like the King in our story, being established in our presence is like we are at the peak of a mountain.
From this vantage point, we look down and can see everything below us. We can see our thoughts, emotions, feelings, running around bumping into each other causing all sorts of problems. Being above them we remain unaffected.
Also as our understanding of our inner landscape becomes more refined we are then able to communicate a higher wisdom to our friends below. We can help them also reach the peak in a harmonious fashion.
From pure awareness, we have the clarity to see things as they are.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
How We Can Use Sleep To Discover Our True Self (Bitesize Wisdom #125)
Today our topic is on how we can use sleep to help us realize our true nature. On my channel, you always hear me talking about being present, being aware, being conscious, etc.
Learning to let go of all that is false in order to discover what we really are.
The problem for most of us is that we are too identified with our thoughts, emotions, bodies and invested into a conceptual story we call “me” that we miss that obviousness of the basic nature of reality.
Many spiritual practices aimed at helping us quiet our minds so that we may eventually clearly see what we really are. The timeless presence or global awareness that is the background to all our experiences. It is the only constant which all apparent objects both physical and subtle rise and subside within this invisible presence. So here we can take advantage of the sleeping process to get better acquainted with our true nature.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
How Life Can Become The Ultimate Teacher: No Attachments No Aversions (Bitesize Wisdom #124)
Today's topic is on Karma Yoga. We will define Karma Yoga simply as the science of non-identifying. This means that we learn to approach life in a way that is equal whether those events are pleasant or unpleasant. That is we approach them consciously. We do not try to avoid the unpleasant things in life, which most people spend their whole lives doing.
When we approach life with non-identifying, we see that it becomes our ultimate teacher. Life gains a whole new meaning. It’s not that life is a teacher, but that through our relationship and non-identifying it comes to be our teacher.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
How Negative Emotions Spoil Everything And Distort Reality (Bitesize Wisdom #123)
In previous videos, I have touched upon how our main centers...which are our intellectual, emotional, and moving/instinctive center of our body...have a positive and negative half….
For example, the positive part of our intellectual center is its ability to say “yes” (affirmation) and negative part is ”no” (negation)..this natural division makes it possible for us to think...without this division we would not be able to consider and reason…
Our emotional center is unique in that we learn that negative half is not natural and intrinsic to the makeup of our emotional center, but was acquired from our interaction with life. It is important for us to come to a deep understanding of our situation of the nature of negative emotions, so that we may begin to break the cycle of being infected and reinfecting others with our negativity.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Generating New Ideas By Contacting Your Inner Stillness (Bitesize Wisdom #122)
Today I want to talk about bringing more original and new ideas into the world. Here we want to quiet and go beyond the purely associative part of our thinking. We want to simply contact our inner stillness and just be open to anything that emerges. If you really learn to be inwardly still and go deeply into it, you will be in a position where an unknown dimension can come into being. You can call it an epiphany, intuition, divine inspiration. Whatever you like. The important thing is that it’s not coming from our associations, but from the deepest part of our being, of our consciousness, which is outside of time. So by being outside of time, it is not coming from memory.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Things Don't Change Until We Change: How To See A New Reality (Bitesize Wisdom #121)
Humans are highly impressionable beings, what happens to most of us is that as we get older we become increasingly conditioned in our minds, emotions, and bodies.
As they say, people get set in their ways. Not only do people have a hard time in changing themselves at the personal level, but also the way in which they perceive the external world becomes very narrow and stale.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Releasing Fear And Anxiety To Live Happy Fulfilling Lives (Bitesize Wisdom #120)
Anxiety and fear keep us on a very narrow path. These limitations are an invisible prison that many of us are unconscious too. It becomes part of our identity, therefore, we no longer see it or question it, although we sense something is quite right.
This is where we need to be able to clearly see if anxiety and fear are a major problem in our life. In order to start heading in a new direction we need to identify how fear and anxiety have limited us. We need to see that we in our prison, the kind of prison it is, in order to plan our escape.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Finding Inner and Outer Balance In Life (Bitesize Wisdom #119)
Today our topic is on finding and appreciating balance. As the quote says happiness would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
The problem is that as we go through life and we have a few amazing experiences, we then seek to only want and to maintain only good feeling states and avoid what we would label as bad experiences. We live in a world of seeming duality, of contrast, without the other side we wouldn’t be able to evaluate and appreciate each experience for what it is. If we only had blissful experiences soon we would take them for granted and would become dull.
We need to learn to see and appreciate the immense diversity of our world. We need to learn to become balanced in mind, body, and heart. To be balanced we need to learn to entertain and hold the opposites in our mind. Many people tend to only think in terms of black or white. They become fixed in their ways of thinking, doing, and being. We then become unbalanced, topsy-turvy.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Finding Your True Self: What's Your Original Face? Understanding Your Persona (Bitesize Wisdom #118)
Society is artificial, we slowly get conditioned into having many faces. To be yourself in society can cause you great inconveniences, hence why almost no one ever shows who they really are. Many of us don’t even know who we are anymore, we just think we do.
The word persona is a very significant word, it is a Latin word meaning mask. This is where the word personality originated from, our personalities are the masks we use to participate in society.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Quote of The Day To Have A Great Day! Wisdom by GK Chesterton (Bitesize Wisdom #117)
I think we have all heard the expression that sometimes people feel like they are carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. Physically you can also see it.
For many of us regardless of our physical weight, in our inner space, we feel obese. We are weighed down by our thoughts, emotions, feelings, our addictions, our past, our expectations of the future
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
Balancing and Understanding Our Intellectual, Emotional, Instinctive Brains (Bitesize Wisdom #116)
Today's topic is on understanding the wrong work of our bodies centers, that being our intellectual, emotional, and the instinctive/moving centers.
In a recent video we talked about the importance of observing and really knowing your centers because doing so gives us a lot of self-knowledge. By properly observing our centers we can determine how conscious we are being in the moment, we can see if our centers are doing their appropriate work and the quality of energy they are using by understanding the different levels of our attention in relation to our centers. We also went into how our centers can be further subdivided into their own intellectual, emotional, and instinctive moving parts along with each center having a positive and negative half.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
How To Be Consciously Creative In Art: Reclaiming Your Childlike Creativity (Bitesize Wisdom #115)
If we want to reclaim the creativity that was once ours, we need to get rid of all our social conditioning’s, otherwise whatever we create is truly not our own unique creation. Our social conditioning only allows us to modify and copy ideas that were never really ours. To be creative in the purest sense is to be an individual, to not allow our creations to be colored by mass psychology.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com
How To Deal With People You Don't Like: Seeing Yourself In Others (Bitesize Wisdom #114)
Today I want you to take the time to think about someone who you really dislike, nay, someone who you may even despise.
What is it that irritates you most about them? Is it that they are inconsiderate? That they don’t listen? Or maybe that they are overly narcissistic?
What if I told you that it is entirely possible to even learn to like these people and that it’s actually in your best interest to do so. Don’t believe me?
Well, if you give me a few minutes of your time and if you make you a sincere effort you will see why other people, especially ones that irritate you, hold the key to an immense understanding of yourself and the world.
To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com