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Your Invincibility Is As Close As Your Attention

Jeremy Perkins invincible
Photo: Jeremy Perkins

Invincibility is yours. And it’s closer than you think.

That’s a trick statement because “thinking” is what keeps you from experiencing your invincibility.

“Thinking” is also the key to getting your invincibility back.

When we use the word “invincibility”, we’re being literal, not metaphorical…

Your attention creates your life experience. We’re being literal here too. A person not used to looking at life that way, or a person who believes only science has all the answers, might be confronted by this literally accurate statement.

But there is no evidence to the contrary.

Give all your attention to what you see and you create more life experience consistent with that. Put your attention in the moment of becoming, however, and you tap into your real leverage. Your seat of power, creation and invincibility.

Your own life overflows with evidence demonstrating that your attention on life creates your life experience. People ascribe these examples to random chance, luck, or coincidence only because they infrequently notice them: they only notice them when they’re particularly stand out-ish.

So it seems such events are few and far between.

But when a person deliberately taps into the moment of becoming they realize these kinds of events are not random. Instead, they are happening all the time. In fact, there is never a time when they are not happening.

You just can’t see it happening because you’re not aware of the evidence. Or you dismiss them thanks to science. Science of course calls such experiences confirmation bias. Categorizing these events as “confirmation bias” keeps you feeling vulnerable.

Become aware of the evidence, however, and you discover evidence everywhere. Doubt turns to belief, belief to knowing.

Before you know it, life shifts.

The subjective point of consciousness (a human being) and the seeming object reality (the person’s life experience) merge in the person’s awareness. The two were never separate to begin with, but dominant beliefs create the experience of separation.

Over time though, what we’re describing soothes such beliefs and life experience transforms.

Before long the person recognizes he is ongoingly creating life experience in a perfect, self-perpetuating loop. Attention creates life experience and “attending” to life experience creates more life experience. Ad infinitum…

Literally.

That’s when life becomes fun, a game of sorts. The objective: perpetual joy, flow and fun.

Of course, you can’t be joyful if you’re not getting everything you want. It’s only natural then that you get that too: Everything you want. And more.

When you get to the point where life experience is an ongoing, deliberate creation born of your attention to what you’re wanting, and you see evidence of what you’re wanting coming to you day by day, or better, moment by moment, something extraordinary happens…

You realize no one and no thing has influence on your life experience.

But you.

That is invincibility. That is what you knew before you came here.

Invincibility: It’s closer than you think, because it’s a by-product of thinking.

 

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Better Is Born Of Fear and Lack

ales-krivec improvement PF blog
Photo: Ales Krivec

Racists are in Portland today demonstrating their hatred with tacit support of our presidential administration. Joining them are the anti-fascists hell-bent on making sure racists know they aren’t welcome in America.

Free speech is the name of the game in the US and it’s a good thing. Even when things such as this erupt.

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Photo: Mike Bivins on twitter

Protesting sounds romantic.

But protests accomplished little. The real action is in the moment of becoming.

But consider the wonder these events offer.

So many people asking for a better way – improvement over current conditions. No matter what side you’re looking at, everyone is asking for improvement. At the very least, everyone at this event has that in common. Even the cops.

But there’s a lot more they have in common.

They share frustration. They share anger.  They share disagreement. They feel woefully disempowered and insecure. Anyone who tries to take the freedom of another is feeling insecurity and fear.

Shortage consciousness.

Portland protest
Protesters in Portland standing against racism (photo: DSA Portland on twitter)

A shifting is being born of all this tension, insecurity and strife. Out of all this there must be something new that emerges.

Nobody can stop forward movement. In a couple decades the United States will be mostly brown.

Those fearing that future may feel the justice of a comeuppance on the horizon. But we know no such thing will come. Diversity doesn’t seek vengeance. And “Diverse” is another name for All That Is.

Be encouraged by all this strife we’re seeing. It always gets worse before it gets better.

How worse it’s going to get is irrelevant. Because the worse it gets, the bigger the better that follows.

And that’s what we’re focusing on.

 

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Stand Out Results Presuppose Stand Out Awareness

ANTOINE BUSSY MOMTENT OF BECOMMING FB

How do virtuosos in anything consistently produce virtuosity?

Some will say “training” or “a good coach” or “luck”. Some may say they were born with it. Often, these standouts will say similar things. Even they don’t understand it.

Some are so bewildered and guilty-feeling in their sense of unworthiness for such success they fall into coping behaviors – sex, drugs, alcohol, porn or worse.

That’s another story.

Training, a good coach, luck…These are reasonable explanations. But there is a better, more consistent and accurate answer that applies to everyone.

That’s right, the same thing differentiating those who do achieve stand out accomplishments can differentiate you as a stand out too.

But first, a short departure….

Everyone knows about gravity. We know, for example, that it existed before its scientific “discovery”. In other words, long before science called it “gravity”, gravity was functioning as well as it functions today.

Now, generally speaking, gravity cannot be seen. Seems like it can be felt, but the feeling of gravity is the effect of gravity. It is not gravity itself.

“Wind” is similar. It can’t be seen. But its effects can be. Like gravity, it too functioned perfectly, thank you very much, before science, or whoever, discovered, then called it “wind.”

Keep this in mind as you read further.

Will Smith Beyonce Usain Bolt Jim Carrey Conor McGregor
Exceptional stand outs

What differentiates stand outs from everyone else is how much time these people spend in “the moment of becoming”, that moment which, like gravity and wind, cannot be seen.

Yet it is no less real.

The moment of becoming is where all points of consciousness exist. It is that no-space, no-time “location” where conscious awareness (another uable-to-be-seen) gives direction to equally unseen “forces”. Those forces eventually coalesce or accrete into co-inciding (i.e. coincidental) objects, events and circumstances desired and expected by the point of consciousness consistently holding its said direction.

Now, the points of consciousness we call “human” aren’t particularly good at giving “consistently held direction” to these unseen forces.  They don’t quite understand what “consistently held” means in this context, nor do they understand indicators meant to help with “consistently holding.”

But like most things about humans and other points of consciousness, there is great diversity. Diversity which includes instances of human that are practiced or at least determinedly focused on “consistently holding”. As a result, they exhibit virtuosity in their chosen fields – applying it to maintaining super stardom in entertainment, achieving excellent physical prowess, magnificent wealth, or…becoming president.

So few humans reach stand out levels. Yet every human can achieve such outstanding results as it applies to his or her or their specific interests and values.

Instead of one or two “superstars” among a large group of “ordinary” folks, the world can be a place where the ordinary is superstardom.

The Buddha* once said “The only difference between a common mortal and a Buddha is one knows he is a Buddha, the other does not.”

It could be added that common mortals also don’t understand their place in time in space. Which is to say they don’t understand their place actually being outside time and space…in the moment of becoming.

But you (or anyone) can quickly and easily come into this knowing.

The results can be as astonishing as the realization itself.

Outstanding results have more to do with what happens outside time and space than is commonly acknowledged. Harness that awareness and you become irresistible in your chosen field.

 

 

*The self-proclaimed original Buddha, Nichiren Daishonin (1222-1282).
Photo credits: Beyonce: By Nat Ch Villa – Derived from: File:Beyonce – Montreal 2013 (3).jpgOriginal source: Flickr: [1], CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27724621 | Will smith By Walmart Stores – Will Smith at the 2011 Walmart Shareholders Meeting, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16269945 | Jim Carrey By Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12271892 |  Colin mcgreggor By Andrius Petrucenia on Flickr (Original version)UCinternational (Crop) – Originally posted to Flickr as “UFC 189 World Tour Aldo vs. McGregor London 2015″Cropped by UCinternational, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45736487
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How to end up with the rest of the sheep

ROBERT COLINS LESS WORK
Photo: Robert Colins

Greater effort doesn’t mean faster (or better) results.

Higher-order refinement aka mastery, in any field, has more to do with what you don’t do than what you do.

Take martial arts for example. At the highest, most esoteric levels, ability comes through stripping away all effort, thereby allowing a soft, gentle…yes…childlike…approach.

In those rarefied skill levels, a perfectly placed step, outstretched hand or flexed knee are more devastating than a full-out punch or kick.

Such devastation isn’t possible unless you are trained not to resist the natural order of things. That training never involves hard work. It always involves play.

Devastating ability is not a product of what the budoka is doing, it is a product of what she is not doing (thinking, trying to make something happen, resisting, anticipating). For in the absence of all that doing she is present to higher-order intelligence, that which has already decided the battle and orchestrates events, including her moves, toward that end.

The same is the case with all things. Life is recursive. Meaning: in every instance, large or small, you will find the same life lessons repeated over and over.

You don’t need a 15th degree black belt to develop then apply this mastery in your life. What you do need is a willingness to go against the grain of “common” wisdom.

You can lead a sheep to wisdom, but you can’t make it think

You’ve likely heard all this before. In the same way you have heard how to get fit, succeed in life, break a habit or form a new one.

We all have knowledge.

But a lot of us are still overweight, still struggling to find success (however you define that), chewing our nails, addicted to masturbation or porn or both, or wanting to go to bed every night before 11 p.m. but still ending up awake at 1 a.m.

Knowledge is useless unless it is applied in a framework capable of producing mastery. Being caught up in the way everyone else is doing it rarely leads to mastery or success. Instead, you end up with the rest of the sheep.

This guy got it. And this guy, in the realm of finding a job.

Both followed their inspiration, not what everyone else was doing. Both got extraordinary results.

Both stories tell of events no one could orchestrate – seemingly random (it’s not random) single events, dovetailing with others leading to the outcome both desired.

You’re no different. What you want is already yours. What’s holding back the having of it?

Perhaps it’s the stories you’re telling yourself – more in your actions than in your words – which perpetuate the same results everyone else is getting.

Follow your internal guidance and the world becomes your oyster.

But first, you gotta figure out how to hear. Hint: It starts with play.

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Hard work is common but unnecessary

ANT ROZETSKY HARD WORK FB.jpg

We’ve been told to work hard. But the very successful don’t become successful through hard work. Even though they too fall into this mythical power of “working hard.”

Work-hard believers point to people like Michael Jordan, Ray Kroc, Thomas Edison and the like, as people who worked hard to get their rewards.

But all of these people, including other very successful people aren’t working very hard. What they are doing is doing the thing that lights their fire.

That’s what keeps a person willing to work all day and night. They aren’t doing that because they want the end goal. They are focused in the now, engaged in a seeming unlimited source of energy born of the connection with their passion and their focus.

In that, they find the delicious experience of flow.

Combat soldiers in the heat of battle get the same experience. They are so focused in the now, their reflexes, attention and abilities are heightened. And they can continue that way for long periods.

This connection is nothing more than the feeling one gets when the human being and its “larger self” are in direct communication. Whether you’re shooting hoops, planning and executing on a business strategy, exploring the limits of electricity, or trying to stay alive when others are trying to kill you, the connection and the indicator of that connection are the same: an intoxicating feeling of aliveness.

But you don’t have to go to Fallujah, create a massive company, or invent a new technology to have this experience. This experience is available to all. And no matter what happens when one’s alive, everyone gets it after death.

But you don’t have to wait to die to have it either.

The great thing is, tapping into it now, while you’re still alive, creates a life experience unparalleled by anything else.

And it’s guaranteed that if you can relax into it, and soothe your indoctrination that hard work is the key to success, you get all you want.

Hard work: unnecessary.

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Work hard. Get paid. Get what you want.

ANT ROZETSKY WORK INSTA FB
(Photo: Ant Rozetsky)

That’s the hard way.

Here’s an easier one: know what you want. Focus on being happy while tuning into your intuition. Your life will take on a leisurely, joyful and ease-filled quality.

And in that state of grace, what you want comes not only easier, and more quickly, but also with greater satisfaction and delight.

All That Is is on your side. It wants you to have all you want. You don’t have to work to get it. And you definitely don’t have to work hard.

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Hard Work Rarely Makes Life Better Or Fun

MATTHEW SCHWARTZ SLOW DOWN FB
Photo: Matthew Schwartz

Life experience says: all you want comes through hard work. Or does it? Success at anything can be easy. All it takes is a Positively Focused orientation.

Life tells you all you want comes through hard work. It tells you that because that’s what you tell yourself.

When you read books from people who “worked hard”, you’re confirming what others told you. Believing you must work long hours because your colleagues, your “competitors” do, or your boss expects you to, only perpetuates what others told you.

Feel you have to work weekends because you’re “behind the 8 ball”?  That attitude reinforces your belief story; the one seemingly consistent with your life experience that says “success comes from hard work.”

It’s the other way around

But your story is NOT consistent with your life experience. Your life experience is consistent with your story.

Change your story and your life will shape itself to fit the new story you tell.

You’ll get immediate results. But unless you know what to look for, you will miss them.

And that’s why people think positive thinking, affirmations, Law of Attraction and things like that don’t work. Because they don’t know what to look for.

Should you be able to drive if you don’t know what road markings mean, or if you don’t understand driving “rules”? Should you be able to teach someone else to drive?

Our guess is you’ll say “Of course not.”

Then we think you’ll agree that not knowing how to see the signs that positive thinking, affirmations and such are working, kinda disqualifies you from being an authority on whether such things work or not.

Success can be inevitable

It’s better to just say “I don’t know.” Because if you don’t know how to see the signs, you don’t know.

Hard work can and often seems to lead to success. That’s only because so many people are working hard at being successful. Meanwhile, what’s actually creating the success they enjoy, has very little to do with the effort they employ.

Hard work is not the key to success. Success comes despite hard work offered. It can be inevitable.

So why are hard workers often successful and those who don’t work hard (seemingly) so often not?

Interesting paradox, isn’t it?

Be the exception not the rule

But if you look more closely, you’ll see FAR MORE hard workers are often not successful and sometimes those who don’t work at all hard are.

Most of us don’t seem to have the luxury of slowing down and exploring what they’re reading here. But overcome that story and test what we’re offering, you will find accuracy in all of this.

Then, you’ll become the exception.

You can be successful without all the struggle you think you have to offer to get it. Through this blog and our 1:1 session work, we show people how success comes easily and hard work becomes obsolete.

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It’s a great time to be alive

SANDEEP SWARNKAR FB PLACE IN TIME

Trump has made America great again…by galvanizing so many against him.

Polarized America portends a balance restoration. Get ready. It’s gearing up to astound.

Gender equality and those pushing against it guarantee more freedom for all. The more strife, the greater the coming shift.

The world seems like it’s gone crazy.

In reality, everything is working out wonderfully.

It’s a wonderful time to be alive witnessing all this. And you are not here by accident. You knew it would be like this. That’s why you came. So enjoy the adventure!

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This. Every day.

appreciation rampage pic
Writing down good-feeling thoughts is a great daily practice.

Make a habit of feeling good. It’s a sure path to seemingly miraculous happiness levels. Only it’s not miraculous.

It’s life.

We are all meant to be happy.

Happy includes prosperity and freedom, including financial freedom and time freedom. Everything you might include as necessary to happiness you can have.

You don’t have to deprive yourself of things to be happy. Unless you want that. Then you can have it.

You’re meant live a continual state of happiness. If you’re not doing that, you’re doing life wrong…but no way is wrong, because every way ends in happy. It’s just that with the way the majority of people are doing life, ongoing happiness comes after death.

But you don’t have to die to be ongoingly happy.

It’s funny how we sometimes say “If I have that guy or girl I’m looking for as a partner I’ll be happy.” Or “He makes me happy.”

Relationships don’t make a person happy.

Having that perfect partner in your life doesn’t make you happy. That relationship, no matter how wonderful, comes with button pushing, unmet expectations, and more opportunities for growth. Can you be happy in a relationship? Yes. But not because of the relationship. You’re happy because you’re happy.

Happy doesn’t come from having that new job, or that car or house you want, or that money you’re wanting or whatever either.

When you satisfy a want, you feel the satisfaction, sure. But notice: over time, that satisfaction fades as new desires dominate your interest. Satisfaction and happiness are not necessarily the same. Satisfaction feels good.

Relationships are like satisfied desires. They are meant to be fulfilled, which brings a state of satisfaction.

Happiness cloud burst

But happiness is borne of in-the-moment-awareness of your recognition, your acknowledgment, that your life is a delightful journey, orchestrated by you in every moment. When you get to that recognition, life becomes what it is meant to be: a continuous string of joyful experiences.

When that becomes your life experience, something else happens too: more of your desires get satisfied. And often, with little effort.

It takes a while to get there, not because it’s hard – it’s actually easy.

It takes a while to get there because you have to gradually slow the influence of your old way of living: thinking that life is hard, that you must work hard, that relationships are hard, that “you don’t always get what you want”, that men are all X and women are all Y.

Once you do get there though….oh my.

So the trip is worth it.

Five steps to starting the trip:

  1. Appreciate, appreciate, appreciate – write down how much you appreciate. Try expressing appreciation for things you take for granted, such as the device you’re reading this on, the shoes on your feet, soap, toothpaste.
  2. Pay attention to what you’re feeling. They clue you in on what you’re thinking. Develop a habit of checking in with yourself throughout the day. We can help you develop habits. We’re really good at it.
  3. Stop listening to the news. Very little – actually almost nothing – in the news pertains to you
  4. Get out more. Take more walks. While you’re out there, practice step one above and notice things in the world you take for granted.
  5. Take time at the end of the day to acknowledge all the good that happened today, including your success in doing these five steps.

Before you know it, you’ll find yourself well on the way towards unshakeable happiness and freedom. We guarantee it.

You are meant to live a happy life. If you’re not, why aren’t you?

 

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Taking fulfillment beyond the yoga mat

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There’s something about yoga that keeps many Portlanders coming back for more.

Maybe it’s concentrated focus borne of asana mastery. Or maybe it’s realizing skills, confidence and strength built from years of practice. Or, perhaps it’s love for a particular instructor.

What keeps you coming back?

While yoga can be fulfilling, many Stumptowners lose what they’ve gained once they’ve left the yoga mat.

Common mortal hood waits just outside the studio, with daily stresses, anxieties, relationship drama, work “to dos”, personal insecurities….sheesh…enduring fulfillment can be as fleeting as a chocolate high.

Yoga was meant as a spiritual practice leading to higher consciousness states. How is it it rarely comes that? And when it does, it leaves us as soon as we return to daily life?

Is permanent, ongoing happiness attainable in modern society?

The answer is: yes.

And it’s available to everyone.

It doesn’t require any physical mastery, yoga or otherwise. It just depends on discovering what you’re made of, where you come from, and then living from that.

From there, seemingly miraculously, everything starts to work in life. Negativity disappears as does anxiety and fear.

Long-held and forgotten dreams and desires begin to be fulfilled too.

Happiness becomes the theme of the day, every day. Before you know it, life becomes what it is supposed to be: amazing.

Positively Focused clients, like Stefano, used to think happiness was a fleeting emotion, with no rhyme or reason why happiness came, or went. One moment it’s here, the next gone.

In fact, many Portlanders just like Stefano, never really experience even fleeting happiness.

Many deal with anxiety, depression, seasonal affective “disorder” and runaway substance consumption habits as they try to manufacture a facsimile of real happiness, contentment or distraction at the very least.

And can you blame them?

We have to deal with Portland winters after all. Hello?

What are emotions for anyway? And why are the good ones so fleeting?

At Positively Focused, we know happiness not an end state. It is just the beginning.

Human life holds the potential to deliver not only happiness, but a joy that has no ceiling. That increasing joy can be a continual moment-by-moment experience.

And, that joy can create a life experience where desire after desire is fulfilled. No desire is too small, or too big.

“You wanna die today?”

The other day we were enjoying this state, walking along the Max Station at Pioneer Courthouse Square. We were greeting those around us with our smile and our eyes. We were in joy, understanding that all that is is working in our favor. The next moment, we caught the eye of a young man.

“What you looking at faggot! You wanna die today?” He yelled at us.

“Do you?” we immediately replied.

“Yes!” he said, as he averted his eyes and hurried off.

A shocking exchange of to say the least!

Clearly, this young man, by the look of his dress and the anger in his voice, was struggling. We couldn’t tell whether his struggle was emotional, financial, relationship-related, substance-related or a combination of these.

What was clear: he craves fulfillment and happiness. We all do.

Yet that was not his life experience. Our reflecting his grief back to him, in the same intensity, but through the opposite emotion left him exposed. Not to us. To himself.

His attempt to destroy us with his words revealed him to himself. Faced with our in-the-moment happiness, our young man had no other choice but to speak truth: his life experience is so unfulfilling, he wanted to die.

This brief, intense encounter, showed us, as life always does when you’re positively focused, evidence of what’s possible for everyone: life mastery. A freedom and personal invincibility so profound you become impervious…even to violence.

Happiness and invincibility: everyone has access to such states. It is how life is supposed to be. Yoga is great. It’s as “Portland” as Blue Star Doughnuts.

Like doughnuts, though, it can’t compare to a life filled with lasting happiness, invincibility and a joy that becomes more and more day after day.

How to become invincibly happy

The key to lasting, invincible happiness is simply learning what you’ve forgotten, then practicing daily habits that restore your memory. You are surrounded by everything you need to cultivate these habits. The internet offers tons of information about them.

Like yoga, a daily practice is required. Picking out peacock from a list of asana pictures is one thing. Knowing how to do peacock is another. Actually doing it is yet another.

In the same way, cultivating daily habits leading to invincible happiness comes from daily practice. You may intellectually know the daily habits (you do). Maybe you even know how to do them. But results come from doing them. Regularly. Consistently.

The good news is, unlike learning peacock, lasting happiness doesn’t require learning something new. It only requires remembering what you forgot.

The bad news is it’s hard to know something you forgot. That’s why we offer assistance.

Back to the habits.

One of these habits, for example, is expressing appreciation. Super simple, right? That simplicity masks a bewilderingly powerful habit. Habitually acknowledging all the great things that make up your life, by itself, can do wonders.

Ever heard the phrase “the best place to hide something is in the open”?

Life is like that. We are surrounded with an unlimited number of things worthy of appreciation. Especially in Portland. Can you name a few? We think so.

And in the naming of just a few of those things, with the right mind set, you automatically get a glimpse of what being consistently happy can do for you. Whether you’re on, or off the yoga mat.

Helpful? Feel free to like, share or comment on this article.