Tag: friends

Posted on

Opening the Door

a special heartOpening the door of your heart:

Grant yourself a moment of peace,
and you will understand
how foolishly you have scurried about.

Learn to be silent
and you will notice that
you have talked too much.

Be kind,
and you will realize that
your judgment of others was too severe.

– Ancient Chinese proverb

Ajahn Brahm wrote a lovely book. In 108 short stories you will find practical wisdom for the ups and downs in our everyday life.

For me, this book is outstanding in various ways but most important: it makes you laugh! 🙂

Amazon.com Opening the Door of your Heart/ Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life’s Difficulties

Deutsche Ãœbersetzung Continue reading “Opening the Door”

Posted on

The Quality of Relations

The Salt and Pepper ghosts in the South of FranceThis blog post is inspired by a tweet from Perez Hilton. Thank you, Perez!

I played matchmaker last night – quite successfully – and I love it! Hopefully, soon, I will meet a QUALITY man myself! I deserve it! #Amen

Have you noticed that some people treat relationships like a (tennis-) match? Even before the two opponents meet, we know already the final result: one winner ”“ one loser

Let”™s have a closer look at the tennis court. Balls are like arguments, the net reminds me of our (inner) censors, the court itself could be named the empathy area and the lines are your (self-set) borders. In the deluxe version you will also find a judge and an audience.

Maybe the following scene sounds familiar: you are happily at a party and suddenly out of nowhere, a couple starts to play. They did not even ask you if you would like to be their judge (or audience). In the not-so-lucky case, you can”™t leave this awkward scene and Scotty just doesn”™t beam you up”¦

What”™s the quality of a discussion victory with a loser and only one winner? It”™s 2010 and you are intelligent! Try a different approach:

Go for win-win, remove your fences, have a look at your own-built limitations (censors, lines ”¦) and have the balls to loose. You can only win, because Love is Louder!

Deutsche Ãœbersetzung
Continue reading “The Quality of Relations”

Posted on

Real Down

Real Down or Real Down - that's the questionWhen you read Real Down, what concept does your brain present you? Maybe some not so comfortable feelings come up. In the ups and downs of life most of us try to avoid the way down. While sinking, we feel like the Titanic.

Naturally we invest a lot of energy to swim against the current. What a waste, you might miss some good lessons. Humans tend to learn quicker in “negative” situations and fake friends could be worth a fortune for you in the end.

When there’s nothing to do, let go — hit the bottom and ground your-self. Now it’s time to jump up!

P.S. … and Real Down by Barbour will keep you warm in wintertime 😉

Deutsche Ãœbersetzung Continue reading “Real Down”

Posted on

ZEN-Sparring with Peter Ralston

Portrait of world champion Peter Ralston“Sparring is a form of training common to many martial arts. Although the precise form varies, it is essentially relatively ‘free-form‘ fighting…” Wikipedia.

World champion Peter Ralston and author of the books Cheng Hsin, Zen Body-Being and The Book of Not Knowing agreed to do some ‘free-form thinking’ with me. I did sent him some questions and he was so friendly to give us some kind of training with his detailed answers. Thank you, Peter!

Let’s do a warm-up:

5. Feelings: Anything we experience only has the value we put into it. If you feel hurt, who did *really* hurt you?

You have to experience not just that you are creating your emotions, but feel yourself in the act of creating the emotions.

6. Work: It seems we struggle day in, day out. What is the highest level of fighting?

One of the most important dynamics I learned while attempting to master fighting is that whenever I had trouble with an opponent ”” when the relationship was characterized as a struggle for me ”” I always found that I was mentally resisting the opponent being exactly the way that he was.

8. Love: Love is being the first one to give. Why are we afraid to love?

When you are afraid to love, or afraid of anything else for that matter, you imagine future negative consequences. If you didn”™t imagine something bad might happen, then you would love freely, wouldn”™t you?

Are you ready for the full, detailed training?
Continue reading “ZEN-Sparring with Peter Ralston”

Posted on

The quality of Sleep


It’s all about quality. The quality of life, love, friends and family. Quantity can make you feel tired, left alone and useless.

How would you connect stress with sleep? My personal life experience is, I can sleep for 10 hours and still feel like a smashed tomato or be totally refreshed after a 15 minutes Power-Nap. What makes the difference?

Our brains are a bit like computers, we have energy saving modes like standby (that’s when you wait in this endless customer support hotline), hibernation (you try to sleep but your brain still takes a backup of today), sleep mode (your brain finally shuts off after you got a blue screen) and dreaming (only for humans, unless you are HAL 9000).

When we enter the supermarket, most of us have a tag cloud in our heads: milk, bread, tomatoes, beer, juice, water, potato chips… We are lost until we start to focus and set priorities. If you want to relax and increase the quality of your life, a good sleep is a great foundation. Power-Naps and Sleep-Ins by ZEN-MEN might be great tools for you. Happy relaxing and Bonne nuit!

iTunes: ZEN-MEN

iTunes: free video podcast by ZEN-MEN

Deutsche Ãœbersetzung
Continue reading “The quality of Sleep”

Posted on

The Book of Not Knowing

Book cover of The Book of not KnowingThe package from Amazon arrived and I thought: “Wow, quite heavy for one single book!” Opened the box and first of all I had to laugh 😀
Does it really take 581 pages to learn how to NOT know? In one word: Yes.

In the past I wrote about two other books of world champion Peter Ralston: Cheng Hsin and Zen Body-Being. The Book of Not Knowing is basically a manual how to dismantle Your-Self. Let’s do a flight through the table of contents (only a few extracts!):

  • Questioning the Obvious
  • A Powerful Openness
  • Beginning to Wonder
  • Knowing and Not-Knowing
  • Learning to Not-Know
  • Empty Your Cup
  • We Are Culture
  • What Is an Insight?
  • Authentic Experience
  • Honesty
  • What Is a Concept?
  • Concepts Dominate Our Perceptions
  • Masks and Hats
  • Looking for Self in All the Wrong Places
  • The Origins of Your Self
  • What Am I?
  • “Doing” versus “Being”
  • The Never-Ending Story of Me
  • Life in the Loop
  • Living as a False-Self
  • All about You
  • Social Survival
  • Survival Is Not Being
  • Changing from Reaction to Experience
  • On the Shoulders of Giants
  • Feeling Trapped
  • Creating a Place to Stand
  • Looking Both Ways
  • The Nature of Emotion
  • The Paradox of Being
  • A Final Word

Keep in mind, there are even more chapters/ topics in the book! My favorites are in the chapter The Nature of Reality: Fear and Anger

Peter leads the way a bit, provides reflective questions to help us to keep on going the path ourselves. If we would only believe the insights Peter talks about, we would just drop into another concept trap. Have you ever thought about how fear can exist? Fear is only possible in a future space-time and maybe you have already noticed, we live in the Now… A hint: fear is not pain…

Anger and a feeling of being hurt are close friends. You find the fuel for anger in your past. It’s up to you how much you feed that fire. Some let it burn until the therapist fires up the three silver bullets: “You have burnout!”

If you know a lot, you are considered clever. If you don’t know much, you are labeled as dumb. Breathing in is a wise move if you like to stay alive - breathing out is considered as intelligent, too!

Besides being a manual, The Book of Not Knowing is also a kind of a dictionary, a travel guide, fun, a translator and liberator. If you are lost in translation at daytimes and are tired of your life in the loop at nighttimes, this book is for you. Thank you, Peter!

Amazon.com The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness

Short feedback from Peter:

Chris,
Thanks for writing about NK. Glad you enjoyed it.
Not sure if “Fear is not pain” will give readers a correct impression, but I doubt it really matters since they’ll have to read up on it anyway.
Thanks for the support, I appreciate it.
Peter

Deutsche Ãœbersetzung
Continue reading “The Book of Not Knowing”

Posted on

Energy for the good Life

Energy for the good LifePeanuts + Charlie Brown + iPhone
=
Energy for the good Life!

The gods of the peanut have sent a tasty tool to Earth: Peanuts now grow in the App Store! I imagine Charlie Brown installing the free app on his iPhone, while he nervously looks at the football and his brain is filled up with one single thought:

Can I kick it???

Lucy holds the ball, Charlie is ready to go – action! While sailing through the air once again, he realizes, something has to be changed. He needs more energy for the good life! But how?

Peanuts! With a loud thud he lands on his back – ouch. “Ground yourself!” was a headline on a glossy, spiritual magazine. Maybe they had a different approach…

That brings us back to the fresh way with which the National Peanut Board wants to help people to get more in balance. The free app for the iPhone/ iPad offers yummy recipes, healthful snacks and a reminder tool. Never ever again run out of peanut butter! And it grows even beyond: a Break button 🙂

Relax with a guided meditation by Stephan Bodian, author of Meditation for Dummies. The full meditation is about 12 minutes. Have a look at your iPhone’s auto-lock settings before you hit the play button. Happy chillaxing with this fine mix out of food, facts and a free-your-mind meditation app. And remember: “You are what you eat.”

iTunes: Peanuts – the free Energy for the good Life App

Deutsche Ãœbersetzung
Continue reading “Energy for the good Life”

Posted on

Enough

Man with hat, Mauritius, OceanEnough is a very relative concept. In Germany 18 degree celsius are warm enough to have a drink on the balcony, whereas it would be too cold for people on Mauritius to go to work.

Let’s have a closer look at that concept. The main elements are:

You – Need ”“ Cure

You are thirsty, your body needs water, the cure is to drink a glass of water or a cup of tea. Easy, right? Now get a lottery ticket, win 10 million $$$ – how many cars will you buy? Why?

Sangter Tulku Rinpoche recently said:

If you have 1$ you have one problem. If you have 10000$ you have 10000 problems.

In various topics of our lives, it seems there is never enough for us. Not enough time, love, money, happiness, freedom, peace, …

When a very good friend told me: “In 10 years we will have fully paid off our house, then we can have a real good life!” I asked him: “And what do you do now in the next 10 years?”

Most times the real trouble with the enough-concept starts when we drop into the compare-trap. The good news is, in most cases, the creator and savior resides in the same brain.

Two friends were at a party held at the mansion of a billionaire. One said, “Wow! Look at this place! This guy has everything!” The other said, “Yes, but I have something he’ll never have: enough.”

Anything in this world, has exactly the value you assign to it. Anything. Think about it, until you have enough…

Thanks Derek for the inspiration!

Deutsche Ãœbersetzung
Continue reading “Enough”

Posted on

Words Of My Perfect Teacher

Sometimes you don’t need many words to describe something:

If he’s enlightened, why doesn’t he act like an enlightened being? … That’s a reasonable question, isn’t it?

Words of my perfect teacher is not only a movie, it’s also a journey inside your heart and soul. Much too often we try to fulfill somebody else’s expectations, we try to follow the rules. On our trail back to real happiness, we either will have to break some rules or  we might lose our-self. Choose wisely!

Amazon.com Words of My Perfect Teacher – DVD

Deutsche Ãœbersetzung
Continue reading “Words Of My Perfect Teacher”

Posted on

The movie of your life

Imagine you are at the cinema, you have a fine place in a relaxing armchair, the lights slowly go out. Luckily we are intelligent beings and even find the coke and our popcorn in the dark. The dark side is strong, we all know this since Star Wars, but especially in a movie theater it would be very boring to sit in the dark for two hours. With one push of a button, the projector lights up and the movie starts rolling…

Most times when we go to the movies we preselect what movie we like to see. Our decision might be based on recommendations by friends, current mood, passed workday or the media. Something moves us to choose. Let’s have a closer look to the involved elements of our movie experience:

  • Without a room – no movie
  • Without a projector – no movie
  • Without a movie – no illusion
  • Without you – no experience

The room and the projector are neutral so to say. It’s the movie and your relation to the movie which charge your emotions and thoughts. The movie wants to light up neuronal thunderstorms in your brain, that’s what it’s made for, but at the end – the trigger is in your hand or head.

What kind of movies do you select for your life? Happy, depressing, action, drama, fear, horror, romantic, trashy or do you simply feel Lost? When you watch a movie, how often do you take your eyes off the canvas or the screen? If you suddenly feel like an actor in your own life, maybe it’s time to pause the movie for a while, step back mentally and remember that the movie of your life is your choice!

Deutsche Ãœbersetzung
Continue reading “The movie of your life”