Taxi - Living Life‏

Dear readers,

A story to share...

I arrived at the address where someone had requested a taxi. I honked but no one came out. I honked again, nothing. So I walked to the door and knocked.

'Just a minute', answered a frail, elderly voice. I could hear something being dragged across the floor.

After a long pause, the door opened. A small woman in her 90's stood before me.

She was wearing a pink dress and a pillbox hat with a veil pinned on it, like somebody out of a 1940s movie.

By her side was a small nylon suitcase. The apartment looked as if no one had lived in it for years. All the furniture was covered with sheets.

There were no clocks on the walls, no knickknacks or utensils on the counters. In the corner was a cardboard box filled with photos and glassware.

'Would you carry my bag out to the car?' she said. I took the suitcase to the cab, and then returned to assist the woman.

She took my arm and we walked slowly toward the curb.

She kept thanking me for my kindness. 'It's nothing', I told her. 'I just try to treat my passengers the way I would want my mother treated'.

'Oh, you're such a good boy', she said. When we got in the cab, she gave me an address, and then asked, 'Could you drive through downtown?'

'It's not the shortest way,' I answered quickly.

'Oh, I don't mind,' she said. 'I'm in no hurry. I'm on my way to a
hospice'.

I looked in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes were glistening. 'I don't have any family left,' she continued.

'The doctor says I don't have very long.'

I quietly reached over and shut off the meter.

'What route would you like me to take?' I asked.

For the next two hours, we drove through the city. She showed me the building where she had once worked as an elevator operator.

We drove through the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived when they were newlyweds.

She had me pull up in front of a furniture warehouse that had once been a ballroom where she had gone dancing as a girl.

Sometimes she'd ask me to slow in front of a particular building or corner and would sit staring into the darkness, saying nothing.

As the first hint of sun was creasing the horizon, she suddenly said, 'I'm tired. Let's go now'

We drove in silence to the address she had given me. It was a low building, like a small convalescent home, with a driveway that passed under a portico.

Two orderlies came out to the cab as soon as we pulled up. They were solicitous and intent, watching her every move. They must have been expecting her.

I opened the trunk and took the small suitcase to the door. The woman was already seated in a wheelchair.

'How much do I owe you?' she asked, reaching into her purse.

'Nothing,' I said

'You have to make a living,' she answered.

'There are other passengers,' I responded.

Almost without thinking, I bent and gave her a hug. She held onto me tightly.

'You gave an old woman a little moment of joy,' she said.

'Thank you.'

I squeezed her hand, and then walked into the dim morning light. Behind
me, a door shut. It was the sound of the closing of a life.

I didn't pick up any more passengers that shift. I drove aimlessly lost in thought. For the rest of that day, I could hardly talk.

What if that woman had gotten an angry driver, or one who was impatient to end his shift?

What if I had refused to take the run, or had honked once, then driven away?

On a quick review, I don't think that I have done anything more important in my life.


We're conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great
moments.

But great moments often catch us unaware-beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.

PEOPLE MAY NOT REMEMBER EXACTLY WHAT YOU DID, OR WHAT YOU SAID, BUT THEY WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER HOW YOU MADE THEM FEEL.

Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we are here we might as well dance.

The #1 Reason Why Most Goals Never Manifest by Thomas Herold

I am sure you understand the idea of setting goals in life to empower yourself. Perhaps what you don't know is that goals require a constant stream of force behind them to keep them alive. In other words, you need to push them all the time to make them come true.

Constantly pushing of your goals, while necessary, is also detrimental to the effective manifestation of the goals themselves. Goals are artificially created by the mind and backed up by the concepts and beliefs that allow them to work.

Take away the concepts and beliefs that give them the foundation to live and your goals will evaporate in no time at all.

How Does This Look Like in Practice?

Let’s assume you've set a goal to lose weight. As you may already know, it is important to set each goal precisely. So losing weight, like any goal, should include exact particulars of what you want to accomplish. Let’s say you want to lose 25 pounds over the next three months, starting today. This goal needs a foundation to work. You need to have some sort of motivation that encourages you to accomplish this goal.

Perhaps one or more of the following acts as your motivation to lose the weight:

• You want to look attractive to others
• You want to look attractive to your partner
• You believe that you are overweight
• You want to fit into your favorite dress or pants again

You need a reason to lose the weight, something that can motivate you to achieve your goal. Whatever the reason behind the goal, you absolutely need to have one, otherwise you won’t have the motivation to even start.

Think of the reason as the decision to change something in your life and the motivation as the energy that affects that change.

The mere act of starting on any goal can be incredibly challenging as it involves being willing to change some of your usual behaviors and concepts in life. We all know what a challenge changing your behavior and concepts can be!

Behavior is changed in the physical domain while concepts are changed in the mental domain. This double whammy of both the physical and the mental is what makes a simple life change like weight loss such a challenge to bring off successfully.

Successful goals always come from a corresponding change in the mental domain.

Why is This?

Simply put, it is because your mind and your thoughts are what create your reality. If you change only your behavior, you will have only short-term success. In time, you will fall back into your old patterns of behavior – the very thing you tried to change in the first place!

So let's assume you are in the second month of your weight loss goal and your partner leaves you. What happens to your goal about losing weight? It doesn’t matter anymore, it diminishes and evaporates into thin air. You just took away both the foundation and the energy for accomplishing your goal. You no longer have a reason and you've lost your motivation.

The problem with goals is that they depend on life circumstances – and they are always forced by mental concepts.

How About Dreams?

Your dreams are powered by Source, by the ultimate power of consciousness. Your dreams are the recognition of what you can do with the unique gifts and talents you have brought into this life. Every person exists with a unique set of talents. These talents lead to a unique way of expressing themselves through various forms of creativity. Universal creativity is really what powers everything behind all manifestation.

With this creativity you are able to serve other people, and in return, you get rewarded with a form of energy. In Western civilization, the most common reward is often money, but creative rewards often come in many other energetic forms like status and recognition, authority, greater outreach to others and more.

In Summary:

You discover your strengths, gifts and talents. You find ways to use them that enrich and support society in practical ways. You are in service to others for serving others in this way is truly life’s ultimate purpose.

Your dreams are powered by your unique creative abilities. These abilities are like a never-ending fountain, the wellspring of your life. They will always be with you, in good times and bad. They are completely apart from and independent of mental concepts. They are powered by your true nature. You can deny them, but you can’t get rid of them.

Even on the worst day of your life, your dreams still exist. If you don’t live your dreams, you must constantly suppress them by engaging in mental concepts like:

• I am too old to start
• I don’t know how to do it
• Nobody will be interested in it
• My friends will hate me when I do it
• You name it!

I have used the words force and power in association with goals and dreams. To understand the concepts behind these words, I highly recommend David Hawkins' book Power Versus Force. Here are a few definitions from the book that help explain the idea of power versus force:

• Force is associated with the partial, power with the whole
• Force must always be justified, power requires no justification
• Force always creates counter-force and its effect is limited by definition
• Force is a movement, power is a skill
• Force always moves against something, power doesn’t move against anything at all
• Force is incomplete and therefore has to be fed energy constantly
• Power is total and complete in itself and requires nothing from outside
• Force constantly consumes while power energizes, supplies and supports
• Pow er gives life and energy, force takes these away
• Power is associated with compassion, force is associated with judgment
• Force requires proof and support, power is inarguable and not subject to proof

People who fulfill their dreams are the happiest people on earth.

They do what’s in their nature. In the end, it is completely irrelevant to them what kind of dreams they have. Dreams don’t need to fit into anything. They don’t need any approval. They don’t need any money to start.

Goals are temporary fixes of your mental desires that do not provide you with lasting happiness. The new car will get old and rusty, the new house will lose its charm over time, and if your goal is to create the perfect partner, you will begin to see your partner’s imperfections over time as well.

Your dreams are a recognition of what you truly are and how you can contribute to this world. You will never do anything else in life more important than this. In fact, in a very real sense there is nothing else in life but this. There is no true retirement from the contributions you can make in this life. You literally live the dream that is your life to your very last breath.

Why not start today to live your dreams in earnest?

What Makes You Stronger by Mark Foo

You are made stronger through adversities.

Life can be hard. You need to accept that as part of the natural order of things. In fact, if you didn't have the hard times, you couldn't appreciate the complete joy of the good times, either!

I am reminded of the well-known statement, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger!" This is very true. Even when you feel as if you cannot bear any more, persevere and you will come out of the situation knowing that you are stronger than ever.

Just as your body is strengthened with tough exercises, your character is strengthened by hardships. These challenges exert pressure on you and make you feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. But each hardship you conquer makes it easier for you to lift off the weight of the next one.

Overcoming hardships also brings you the confidence to face new challenges. If you did it once, twice, or many times, you know that you can do it again!

Living through hardship also provides you a new appreciation of life. Be grateful for the good times and can find joy in even the most trivial moments.

Today, plan to persevere through any hardship that may befall you, knowing that you can come out on the other side of the situation stronger than before.

Self-Reflection Questions:

1. How has one of your recent hardships made you stronger?
2. Did it allow you to appreciate the good things in your life more fully?
3. Now that you've been through it, do you feel more confident about future hardships?

Learn To Enjoy Change by Mark Foo

Change is a blessing that you should learn to enjoy.

Be grateful for the gift of change. Without change, you would never be able to grow, learn new things, accomplish your goals, or look forward to anything different than what you've got. Even though you may resist change at times, you should learn to enjoy its possibilities.

Even when change is forced upon you and brings challenges, it opens new doors of opportunity. Do realise that a change that seems devastating can actually propel you into a better life!

Where would you be today if you had not lost that job, causing you to seek a better, more fulfilling path in life? How could you have the spouse you enjoy now if you had not left your old boyfriend/girlfriend behind?

Change is one of the blessings that come with the power of choice. You can choose to leave things the way they are, or change them to something better.

You can choose to waste your life fighting inevitable changes or take advantage of them and enjoy life. When life hands you lemons, choose to make lemonade!

Change allows you to learn and grow. As you strive to achieve your goals, embrace the changes in your life that bring you ever closer to success. With each change, you'll become more knowledgeable, stronger, and more confident that you can handle whatever life may bring.

Know that today brings its share of changes. Choose to welcome them all and allow yourself to enjoy all opportunities that come your way.

Self-Reflection Questions:

1. What changes are you resisting in your life right now?
2. How can you embrace these changes and use them to improve your life?
3. Is there something you can change to move you closer to your goals?

The 5 Emotional Beasts that Prey on your Power to Manifest by Thomas Herold

Do you know the difference between a feeling and an emotion?

You may say that emotions are much deeper and stronger than feelings. From one viewpoint, that's true. However, here’s a detail about feelings that you may not know about: you can observe your feelings but not your emotions.

When you experience feelings you are the observer and in full control; when you experience emotions, you cannot remain the observer and you are not in control.

Emotions Seems to Have a Life of its Own

In most cases, you can only experience them and not control them. You are no longer in control – the emotions are! They act collectively as a kind of psychic clone of the more complete, more human you.

That's the reason why we have emotional reactions to things that we sometimes later regret. We scream at our partners, we leave our friends, and we smash things until they break. Mostly, this emotional clone is reactive, uncontrollable, and seemingly independent from our core selves.

The Wolf Story

A sage once said that each person has both a white and a black wolf inside himself that constantly fight each other. The black wolf is aggressive and reactive and the white wolf is calm and social. The winner of this battle is simply decided by which wolf we feed. Most of the time we are not aware that, more often than not, we feed the black wolf and not the white one.

What can be done about this?

The black wolf can only live inside when you create it in the first place. A black wolf is a black hole that sucks up your energy.

1. The Black Wolf Called Anger

Anger is the result of not taking 100% responsibility for your life. You created this wolf by reacting to an experience. Then you forgot that you created it. If you decide to take ownership of your creation, you must simply feel your way through the original experience. That feeling could be sadness, for example, but not anger.

Sadness is the original feeling and an angry black wolf is the emotional result.

Perhaps you blame someone else for your anger. By doing so, you make another person responsible for the wolf creation that is yours and yours alone! It’s important to remember that everything in this world is a creation of yours in one form or another, even things that seem to have nothing to do with you directly.

2. The Black Wolf Called Resentment

Resentment is very close to anger. When you harbor resentment, you limit the spectrum of your feeling nature and a major part of you closes down. When you resent someone, you are saying very forcefully that the other person is the problem, the cause and the fault, not you. You forcefully blame the other person so you don't have to look within.

You are declaring the other person, group or institution to be your enemy.

The problem is that resenting your enemy creates a dilemma that centers around the conflict that come from not taking full responsibility for the the situation. Ultimately, it is you who has the conflict, you who faces the dilemma, and you who began to harbor resentment.

3. The Black Wolf Called Blame

Like resentment, blame is not much different from anger. In both cases, you attempt to make someone else responsible for what you feel by creating an emotional reaction. Resentment and blame are different faces of this type of emotional reaction.

Resentment is a form of disappointment that seems to have its source on the outside. For example, should you get fired it seems logical that the cause is your employer. If such a calamity happened, there probably wouldn’t be much you could do about it. The cause seems to be external (your boss) even though your emotional reaction is generated within.

Everything changes when you accept that the cause is always you.

You created it (you took the job), you experienced and accepted the situation (you created a positive or negative environment in which to work), and you reaped the results (you got rewarded or fired). You alone are responsible for this wolf. Why did you create a black wolf when you could have just as easily created a white one?

4. The Black Wolf Called Guilt

Guilt is much like blame of others, but turned back on yourself. When you’re guilty, you actually take ownership of what you did. So why would you feel bad about it? Because you judge yourself as having taken the wrong action in a given situation.

You did it and now you are convinced it was wrong.

With a little introspection, you’ll realize that guilt does not come from the original situation or action itself, but from the self-imposed judgment after the action. This judgment is, in fact, an emotional reaction that questions the original action you took in a given situation. When things fall apart afterwards, you tell yourself, “I made a mistake; I did not want to cause this.” You blame yourself.

5. The Black Wolf Called Betrayal

This is one of the hardest beasts to tame. The emotion of betrayal runs deeply. Betrayal occurs mostly after you have trusted someone close who then fails to satisfy that trust in some fashion. By trusting someone, you opened yourself up to be in a vulnerable state.

At some point, your trust is betrayed or even used against you. You thought that you had correctly judged your confidant as trustworthy, but now you are being punished in some way. It just makes no sense – it hurts! Betrayal is the emotional reaction to this (perhaps completely justified) feeling of being hurt by another.

Negative Emotions are a Pack of Black Wolves

This pack is vicious, fast, and can be deadly. They hunt you from the outside, circling closer until they can attack within. They may stalk you for days, months, or even years. This pack follows some people to their graves, snapping and snarling all the way. The pack is energetic and invincible. Like black wolves, e-motions are negative energy in motion.

It's part of your creative manifesting power used against yourself!

You can eliminate them in a very short time – given the correct understanding of their nature and the techniques to vanquish them. The most potent weapon against them involves a miraculous inner process few practice completely, let alone fully understand.

Remain Adaptable To Everyday Changes by Mark Foo

Change is a natural part of life. Those who adapt, thrive. Those who don't, become extinct! Choose to thrive, to use change to help you grow and learn, and to take advantage of new opportunities to help you succeed.

When you think about it, you'll realize that the only true constant in life is change. As each new day dawns, it brings you new opportunities. As each day passes, you know that you are different, even if only slightly, from the day before.

Know that you can incorporate life's changes into your journey with confidence.

If a day does not go as planned, restructure your timetable to fit in the change. Leave enough room in your schedule to make some unplanned stops along the way. Then get back on track as soon as you are able to.

When challenges arise, adjust your path to accommodate them. Take time to seek solutions and then act decisively on your decision, adapting to the new circumstances without flinching.

Major changes may even require you to adjust your priorities or reset your goals. Let go of the tendency to resist something just because it is a change from what you are used to. Instead, re-make your plans to take advantage of the benefits these new changes can
bring.

Today, plan to discover the benefits of change and adapt yourself to make the best use of your new opportunities.

Self-Reflection Questions:

1. Do you have a tendency to resist change?
2. What recent change has brought you positive benefits?
3. What can you do to take advantage of some of the changes in your life?