Passion, Power or Fruit?

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Rod's World

I have recently been getting a lot of articles in my News Feed about how the education system is letting our children down, that they learn very few practical skills for later in life and definitely do not look at what are you passionate about. When they begin at the age of four or so they are astronauts Prime Ministers, League footballers, Rock Stars but this is soon crushed out of them as impractical and everybody is taught from the same book.

So how do we get our Passion back? For me it was a journey of lots of workshops, long periods of mental health issues, running marathons, drug taking , singing in choirs etc. I found it attending a film night at the end of my last period of Mental Health issues. A Colombian film at the Darebin Intercultural Centre in Preston, Victoria, Australia I was impressed by the sense of community. I asked if I could volunteer and that is when my love of Interculturalism began. Here are the links to the Facebook group I created called Interculturalism, a place people can post their examples of the ethos, Love and Respect for All, Everyone Included Interculturalism.

I have chosen 15 quotes on Passion and of course, one of them is from Oprah, here we go.

!. Oprah, loved or hated. I’m part of the former group. A newsreader who has created an empire based on possibility and sharing it. One passionate individual.

2. It is said that your dreams often reveal your passion in life to you. I have been remembering mine more and more lately and it looks like it includes travel.

3. I recently posted that Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa had the same 24 hours as we did. What made the difference is their level of passion, I think. My brother went ape-shit at it, is saying I was being arrogant. Not arrogant, passionate.

4. I receive a post called The Daily Flame from my friend Lissa Rankin who I met in Byron Bay. My friends think I write it. It is empowering your Inner Pilot Light, her latest book is about it The Fear Cure. If your Inner Pilot Light is aflame people will notice.

5. Beauty is one thing that attracts our attention. It interrupts the mundane. How to transform the mundane into beauty is live a life of passion fulfilling your dreams.

6. Passion begins now. You don’t have to know how it s going to be fulfilled, that’s called perfectionism , one of life’s booby prizes.

7. I find that as I get into filling my life with things I am passionate about this rings true. Don’t know about no sleep though. A different time and space continuum I’m thinking.

8. Deepak Chopra, doyen of the Spirituality genre, says Always, yes lets repeat that again, Always go with your passions, Are You doing this?

9. Vincent Van Gogh, In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks, including 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches and prints. This is passion, to me boredom is a made up concept that covers our profound laziness.

10. Love this, the Drunkenness of the mind, when we have lost control of our senses. Being sensible and being passionate do nor correlate in my world.

11. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, one of the great philosophers of the 1700’s was a poet, novelist, playwright, diplomat and civil servant as well. He points to you see the world as angry or sad if you have an angry heart, but it is just as easy to have a happy and passionate one. Its your choice after all.

12. Our hearts, the lifeblood for our bodies. Why are more and more people dying from heart attacks in our heavily compartmentalised world. I think its time we etched Passion on them at birth.

13. Dennis Waitley is a founding member of the Council for Self Esteem, the old chestnut of make you life about what lives in your heart , not your wallet. Love the image as well.

14. I see the sun come up most days. This is a new occurrence over the last few years. For most of my life my sleep was a sacred site as it filled up my day as relevantly as what I was doing to fill up the rest of the day. No alarm clock for me.

15. Novelist Galen Watson combines the two things that will have you live an extraordinary life, Passion and Love in his moving quote.

Passion turn to the left, Passion turn to the right or whatever direction you need to to fulfil your dreams. Namaste until next time my dear friends.

Love to Love you Baby!!

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Rod's World

I have struggled with Self Love my whole life. I have taken self loathing to the point of being hospitalised 5 times in the past ten years. I did numerous courses and read numerous books to try and work out why? It has been only recently since taking up body work with Arion Light through The Activation School and his ground breaking course Creative Mastery that I have shifted into the world of Self Love.

It was through the practice of acceptance of what I thought was wrong with me not get out damn spot that allowed me to access this precious state. I have chosen 15 beautiful quotes to have a discussion on what stops us and how we can come to it. Oprah’s included.

1. The first person who hears your words, spoken or not is the one looking back in the mirror, and they have a good memory, be kind and speak with compassion.

2. Brene Brown, expert on vulnerability was a University professor before her rise to becoming one of the most respected authors of the Conscious movement. In her work Brene pushes the importance of daily practice. For Self Love she suggested embracing the now not the when.

3. It doesn’t matter how often other people tell you You are beautiful, until you get this in your soul, they are wasting their breath.

4. Shine on , You Crazy diamond, great song from Pink Floyd, great advice to listen to when you wake up.

5. How many times have you said this to someone? Perhaps Awesome, you’re flying on all cylinders might be more appropriate.

6. When the applause dies down , what is left , Do things for your own pleasure not others because some day they will not approve of you.

7. I have just finished reading Lissa Rankin’s great book, The Fear Cure – Cultivating Courage as Medicine for the Body, Mind and Soul. You get to write your own prescription for Courage at the end, an acknowledgement what it is that provides you with Self Love to Ignite your Inner Pilot Light. Here’s the link to her page The Fear Cure

8. As I mentioned I have been hospitalised for mental health issues 5 times in the past 10 years. So I fully agree with this statement that being in love or not with yourself has a profound effect on your health.

9. Alan Cohen has two persona’s, owner of a national Ice Hockey team in the United States and author of 23 inspirational books on Hay House publishing. If you Love you Live Now is now my choice in life.

10. Remember when you were a kid and you and your friends used to go looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but really didn’t know which end it would be at. Here’s the solution, Live like there is a pot of Self Love at each end.

11. The Work is a fantastic site that Byron Katie has built for people to transform themselves through her 4 questions

Is it true? (Yes or no. If no, move to 3.)
Can you absolutely know that it’s true? (Yes or no.)
How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
Who would you be without the thought?

It’s up to us to engender self love not others.

12. Oprah, people either love or hate her, there seems to be no in-between, I am a former. The opportunities she creates for people to enter the state of Self Love is profound, I honour her for her stand for possibility.

13. Is Hate to strong a word to use when referring to your self, perhaps we need to go all the way down to ground zero to come out the other side of Self Love

14. As I said in my previous blog Stand by Your!! I made one of the toughest decisions I had in my life asking the woman I thought was going to be my soul-mate to go away. This quote refers to why I did it. I treat myself a whole lot differently to how I did 12 months ago.

15. Finally a quote that points out how much psychological weight you carry around when you rely on the acceptance by others. A friend asked me how much weight I had lost the other day. I replied in kilo’s none, but in my mind and soul tons and tons.

Well, I know that this is a life time journey and I have a lot of years practising self loathing so I commit to a daily practice of self love for the years I have remaining, we will see what occurs, if its anything like the miracles that have occurred in the past 12 months I am in for a highly enjoyable wild rode.

Namaste until next time, my dear friends.

Stand by your?

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Rod's World

I made one of the toughest decisions in a long time the other day. I told the woman I thought could be my soul-mate to go away. I had sent her an SMS message daily , that’s the way she liked to communicate, for the past five months what I liked or loved about her.

Yet she continually reminded me that I was being negative towards her and seemed to store them in a negativity database to bring out when she felt like. The last time she did it was during a conversation where she contacted me saying she had been sad and teary and thanking me for my latest SMS.

I offered to stop what I was doing and come and see her. It went through this weird process which ended up in her messaging she was not sure whether she wanted to see me due to my negativity. This is why I do not like communicating by SMS, it is totally impersonal and can be misconstrued by both parties.

I have chosen 15 quotes about breaking up, one of the things I used to consider the hardest thing to do. Here they are.

1. It takes you to get to that point where you know your rights are being abused before you say enough is enough, do it and hope they get the message .

2. My heart has been hurting since I did it, The last thing I wrote was that PS I still love you, but self love has to come first.

3. It takes something to do this, you argue with yourself remembering the good times, and I will miss them so much. But I have grown as a person over the last six months and know what I want in my life

4. The she’ll be right syndrome. The horses head on the meal table Say it like the image you prefer but you have to go all the way down in your relationships to come out the other side.

5. Not at this point yet, far to soon and my heart is still hurting. But I can relate to the concept, it seems it will open space for me.

6. I told her that I would change my life to see her more often because I did think of her a lot when doing things wishing I was that she was there. Now I won’t have to, shame really.

7. I’m not sure if this is true for me at the moment, they say you should fight cat and dog for those you love.

8. I didn’t realising it was hurting me until the last time, I had always apologised for doing it, then realised I wasn’t the person she was referring to, so got the lesson.

9. In my heart I don’t want to do this, but my anxiety level says something else, that for my health I need to or have it dramatically change.

10. This is a nice way of putting it, perhaps they should put it on all government forms.

11. I thought I was satisfied with where I was at, my truth had other ideas and said stand up for yourself.

12. Self explanatory, this is the silly humorous quote in case I got a little too serious.

13. Was I asleep, it didn’t feel like it. Will discover this over the next few weeks.

14. I suppose it happens in all friendships, that there is a honeymoon period. When you are not contacted for several days you realise that its over.

15. What would it be like if you had an unbreakable heart, I think it would have to be made of plastic. Meanwhile we journey down the Yellow brick road of Relationships.

I am getting sadder and sadder as I write this , yet I stand for my decision to have the right not to be criticized on an ongoing basis.

Namaste until next time my dear friends

He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother!!

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Rod's World

Just got back from my second Menergy, last year I had the worst flu I had had in 10 years and could barely walk and slept through the main ceremony, here is the article I wrote about it Menergy with the flu.

Since I have been back a lot of people have asked me how it was, the majority of them women, with one saying last night she was considering a sex change so she could attend Menergy next year. I an still integrating the experience because it was so jammed packed so I have extracted 15 Brotherhood quotes to comment on what I think I got from the weekend.

Wikipedia defines Brotherhood as follows

Brother, a male sibling
Brotherhood (Order of the Arrow), a membership level in the Boy Scouts of America honor society..
Fraternity or Brotherhood, a male social organization

I think a few of the 165 men who attended may have been boy scouts here, me being one of them , but I don’t remember the brotherhood level.

1. Martin Luther King was a powerful spokesperson for the power of brotherhood and I think the Heart Space ceremony on the Saturday Night speaks to what he is referring to. can’t reveal anymore about it, come along next year and experience it yourself.

2. Arne Rubenstein, champion of supporting boys to become good men donated twenty books and information about his Rites of Passage work as he unfortunately could not attend but supports the work of Menergy. better men makes for better family relationships.

3. The gathering allowed men to be vulnerable with each other, and as the trust grew the sharing got deeper which they could take back to their relationships.

4. American journalist Heywood Broun was famous for having penned this quote that it is in the art of community building that leads to a happy life. menergy is living proof of this.

5. From 19 to 87 years of age, 165 men who had never gathered before and will never gather again came from their neighborhoods to create a beautiful sense of what LBJ is pointing to here, Brotherhood.

6. When we gathered around the welcoming fire at 4.30 am in the morning and you looked around at the different states the men were in, from tiredness to ecstatic joy I got a sense that the power of circles would become normal in the not to distant future.

7. Googling Darrel Mitchell brought up information about Daryl Mitchell, the African American actor who was paralyzed half way through his career after a road accident. With the support of his friends Denzel Washington and Chris Tucker he has remained an actor. Support like this was extended to those who found some workshops or processes confronting.

8. Aldous Huxley, author of a Brave new World stated that a brotherhood was only as powerful as the love and justice each man showed to each other. using this as a measurement Menergy will continue to grow from strength to strength.

9. Menergy has this as one of its principles, from the inclusion of the local indigenous brothers at the opening ceremony to the spread of different nationalities I’m sure this will spread more and more as Menergy becomes the event for conscious men of all nations to attend.

10. All these words speak to me as what occurred over the weekend, none less important than the other.

11. As we grow up and leave our sporting and scholastic days and enter our adult duties we sometimes forget the bonds we created earlier in our youth. it takes something to keep friendships your whole life. Menergy is a way of reversing this practice.

12. The closing ceremony always goes over time, because yes you do create some sort of brotherhood in 4 days. Deep, loving support for all the men who you have gone through a no bull shit period of time with.

13. Leading Civil Rights lawyer Clarence Darrow also stated that You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free. We were placed in smaller tribal groups of 5 or 6where we went deep with each other and shared with each other what our freedoms were.

14. Poetry was featured at the cabaret, Poet Edward Markham stands for that conscious brotherhood is the great missing link in our societies journey towards better relationships between men and women and children.

15. And finally the locale, Licola is in a beautiful valley on a pristine river, how could you not include all living creatures in your brotherhood.

That’s my experience of the inspiration that is Menergy, see you all my good btorhers there next year.

Namaste until next time my dear friends

Forgive and Forget, Is it that Easy?

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Rod's World

I was recently talking to a friend outside her house discussing what publicity I could help with for an event she was involved with to receive a discounted ticket when I recieved an SMS from my bestest friend asking me if I was off the airwaves.

I SMS’d her back and explained what I was doing or at least I thought I did. I then received another SMS asking where we still going out that night. I sent one back saying that going out with her was my main priority. The reply I received was not what I expected, It was that she had not felt that way for a long time and felt I was being negative to her.

After the initial shock of receiving such a reply I realise that we needed to discuss the difficulties we had been having in catching up and forgive each other and re- establish our friendship to what it had been when we first started going out with each other.

Wikipedia defines Forgiveness as follow –

Forgiveness – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia//

Forgiveness is the intentional and voluntary process by which a victim undergoes a change in feelings and attitude regarding an offense, lets go of negative emotions such as vengefulness, with an increased ability to wish the offender well.^[1]^[2] Forgiveness is different from condoning (failing to see the action as wrong and in need of forgiveness), excusing (not holding the offender as responsible for the action), pardoning (granted by a representative of society, such as a judge), forgetting (removing awareness of the offense from consciousness), and reconciliation (restoration of a relationship).^[1]

In certain contexts, forgiveness is a legal term for absolving or giving up all claims on account of debt, loan, obligation or other claims.^[3]^[4]

As a psychological concept and virtue, the benefits of forgiveness have been explored in religious thought, the social sciences and medicine. Forgiveness may be considered simply in terms of the person who forgives^[5] including forgiving themselves, in terms of the person forgiven or in terms of the relationship between the forgiver and the person forgiven. In most contexts, forgiveness is granted without any expectation of restorative justice, and without any response on the part of the offender (for example, one may forgive a person who is incommunicado or dead). In practical terms, it may be necessary for the offender to offer some form of acknowledgment, an apology, or even just ask for forgiveness, in order for the wronged person to believe himself able to forgive.^[1]

I have chosen quotes from across the Ages to see what our society has to say about it, Here we go –

1. In our love relationships we will always come across things that make us arc up. This enables us to practice the noble art of forgiveness on a daily basis to restore the deep state of Love that we committed too when choosing those particular people to fulfil these roles in our life.

2. When we are ruminating on the past and blaming others or being the victim of circumstances in our lives, it is valuable to realise tht we cannot change events as they occurred but we can drastically lessen the effect they will have on our future by uttering the words, silently or out Loud, I foryou you, me , them etc. etc.

3. Lissa Rankin, Author of the ground breaking book The Fear Cure points to that a major percentage of disease is caused by False Fears. On reading the books I discovered that a lot of these fears come from things and events where you have not forgiven ,even to the point of Heart Attacks, here is the link to her page about it – The Fear Cure .

4. Self Forgiveness is an important part of Self Love, a state that is required to allow other Love into your life. Be courageous in admitting that even you make mistakes.

5. Holding on to interactions and events that play on your minds days and years later is very bad for your mental health research shows. Converting these from a bitter experience to a valuable lesson will free you from the debilitating illnesses that often follow the practice of blame and shame.

6. Every Tuesday the local Council come and collect the rubbish I have been unable to recycle. If is was as easy to clear the mind of holding of things from the past that clutter up our lives.

7. The vow goes I will love and cherish, whether in Good Fortune or adversity. Its not always plain sailing on the good ship Matrimony. Moments of forgiving occur every single day as we journey down this sacred path.

8. How long have you sentenced yourself to. I had one shadow belief that was from the age of four. It only took to the tender age of 60 to realise what it was costing me, the world looked very different after letting this one go. I suppose there was no internet and Facebook when I took it on.

9. World Peace Day is 21st September, It is dedicated to world peace, and specifically the absence of war and violence, there have been a total of 26 days of peace since 1945, the end of World War 2, the War to End all Wars. Oops got that one a little eschewed.

10. Be in the Now, Moment to moment, Discipline – all words that point to what is needed to live in the state of the dignity of True Forgiveness.

11. Any you an anyone or a butterfly? Butterflies have beautiful colours and character and fly lightly in the wind because they are not carrying their past burdens around with them.

12. Two steps forward, three steps back doesn’t get much done. When you grant yourself and others the precious gift of forgiveness you free your feet from work-boots to the latest Nike runners and you have the ability to Just Do It!!

13. Promises, Promises was a minor hit for the band Naked Eyes in the eighties. What they sung in the 80’s. Its about how much value we place on them. When you forgive it better be of a reasonably high level.

14. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a fantasy about a man who grew younger not older. He grew smaller the longer his life went on, do you by holding on to those grudges?

15. Finally, the words you use in your life is what gives you your power. In Australia we are known for saying sorry for the simplest of things. So when you have cut someone deep those words have little effect, Try on Will you forgive me?

We had a frank and moving discussion that night when we went out and restored the relationship to nearer what it had been. I didn’t sat please forgive me. I will next time I see her.

Namaste until next time , my dear friends