Prosperity and Jealousy - the envious connection

Wishing you sustained prosperity on this festival of Diwali.

 

I recently read a book “Power of your subconscious mind” by Dr. Joseph Murphy. This book has many real-life stories about how people transformed their lives by changing their beliefs.

The fundamental thought in the book is that your conscious thoughts play less than 1% role in your reality. We are gifted with a subconscious system. Ever wondered how we keep breathing, heart keeps pumping, a cut clots quickly, without any conscious thought or action on our part. That is our subconscious mind running our body system.

Dr Murphy says that everyone’s subconscious mind is connected to an infinite intelligence (The FORCE – as the STAR WARS fans would say). The subconscious mind makes your deeply held beliefs true by attracting people and situations. The conscious mind codes the subconscious mind through its internal dialogue: our every fleeting thought is coded !!

If you ever wondered why the flow of wealth in your life is not in line with your potential, your internal dialogue may be responsible and you can change it !   

What struck a chord with me about this book is what makes the wealth fly away is ENVY.

Many of us are envious of people who are doing better than us. We rationalize and conserve our self-worth by our internal dialogue. We find some points where we are superior to these people (e.g. I have more time for my hobbies and family. I am healthier. I have work-life balance). Sometimes we question the means used to accomplish the wealth (Must have done some shady deals or manipulation. Being honest doesn’t pay. You have to kiss up your way to success. These methods my conscience doesn’t allow).

These internal dialogues of envy deplete our energy (short term loss) as well as code scarcity in our subconscious and block the wealth coming our way (long term loss).

The solution suggested? Rejoice in the wealth and success of others. That is the only choice we have if we wish to be prosperous in line with our potential. That way our subconscious will include wealth and bring it to reality as well.

How to rejoice? By thinking “May this person continue his success and do better in life”. This may appear difficult in the beginning but it is worth the effort. The affirmation (in the image) “I am attracting wealth & prosperity in unlimited abundance” will work well with this thought. However, any envy will nullify this affirmation!!

This Diwali, may you rejoice in the wealth and success of others and thus, wealth and success you truly deserve, come your way!!

A surprisingly simple routine to increase joy in your life

Read the full article by independent post here:

A friend forwarded an article recently. Here are the excerpts that resonated with me a lot:

Who is the happiest man in the world?

If you Google it, the name "Matthieu Ricard" pops up.

Matthieu Ricard, 69, is a Tibetan Buddhist monk originally from France who has been called "the world's happiest man."…

…To Ricard, the answer comes down to altruism. The reason is because thinking about yourself, and how to make things better for yourself all the time, is exhausting, stressful, and ultimately leads to unhappiness.

"It's not the moral ground," Ricard explained. "It's simply that me, me, me all day long is very stuffy. And it's quite miserable, because you instrumentalize the whole world as a threat, or as a potential sort of interest [to yourself]." 

If you want to be happy, Ricard says you should strive to be "benevolent," which will not only make you feel better, but it will also make others like you better. (That's not to say you should let other people take advantage of you, Ricard warns, but you should generally strive to be kind within reason)…

Ok, so how does one train their mind to be happier?

Just spend 15 continuous minutes a day thinking happy thoughts, Ricard says

Typically when we experience feelings of happiness and love, it's fleeting and then something else happens, and we move on to the next thought. But Ricard says instead, concentrate on not letting your mind get distracted and keep focused on the positive emotions for the next stretch of time. And if you do that training every day, even just two weeks later you can feel positive mental results. And if you practice that for 50 years like Ricard has, you can become a happiness pro too.

I found this advice very practical. Just attempt it. If 15 minutes appear long, start with 5 minutes. Do it with a timer. You can even experiment it with your team, partner, family or another person. You will be surprised how amazing each one feels at the end of it.

This can be built into a habit. Being your work day with just 5 minutes of continuous happy thoughts. And see the magic unfold.

Handling situations that hold you hostage

Are you being held hostage without knowing it?? Last month I was doing research on ‘Authentic Dialogue’ and ‘Conflict management’ and I came across this gem of a book.

Hostage at the table – George Kohlrieser. 

 

Here is the starting story from this book:

A nine-year-old girl was spending time with her grandparents in Kansas. The grandfather was away, so she was sleeping with her grandmother.

Suddenly, she woke in the middle of the night to see her elderly grandmother sitting up in bed and a man standing over her, dripping with rain and with a wooden club in his hand, ready to strike. The little girl felt a scream rising, and then her grandmother touched her hand and she felt a flood of calm wash over her. 

The grandmother said to the man, “I am glad you found our house. You’ve come to the right place. You are welcome here. It is a bad night to be out. You are cold, wet, and hungry. Take the firewood you have there and go stir up the kitchen stove. Let me put some clothes on, and I will find you some dry clothes, fix a good hot meal, and make a place for you to sleep behind the stove where it is good and warm.” She said no more but waited calmly.

After a long pause, the man lowered the club and said, “I won’t hurt you.” She then met him in the kitchen and cooked him a meal, gave him the dry clothes, and made a bed up for him behind the stove. The grandmother then went back to her bed and she and her granddaughter went back to sleep. They awoke in the morning to find the man gone.

At about 10 A.M., the police arrived with a canine unit that had followed the man’s scent to the house. They were shocked to find the grandmother and granddaughter still alive. The man was a psychopathic murderer who had escaped from prison the night before and brutally slaughtered the family who were the nearest neighbours.

This story gave me goose bumps. I was wondering how would I handle such a situation. How would you? I learnt that there is a another way beyond fight / flight / freeze response.  

The author goes on to say:

This amazing grandmother had created so much emotional bonding with the intruder that he could not kill her. She had treated him with a kindness and respect that had disarmed him both literally and figuratively. The fact is people do not kill people, they kill things or objects …

Fortunately, the likelihood of physically being taken hostage is slim. However, all of us can be taken hostage metaphorically – that is, made to feel threatened, manipulated, and victimized – everyday by bosses, colleagues, customers, family members, or virtually anyone with whom we interact. We can also become hostage to events or circumstances happening in our lives. We can even become hostages to ourselves, our own mind-sets, our emotions, and our habits.

The author is a former hostage negotiator. He offers keys to managing conflict at work and in our everyday lives.

This book changed my relationship with conflict. I had a kind of ‘conflict phobia’ and a tendency to avoid confrontations. I learnt that it is only by openly facing conflict that one can truly progress through the most difficult challenges. I have started taking things head on instead of avoiding them or hoping that they disappear by some magic.

With many true and compelling stories, this book shows how to:

-        Put the ‘Fish on the Table’ to resolve conflict

-        Learn to bond, even with your ‘enemy’

-        Never think like a hostage

-        Tap into the power of dialogue and negotiation

-        Access the law of reciprocity to build cooperation

-        Be a secure base to establish trust

-        Understand that the person is never the problem

-        Master the mind’s eye and visualize success

This TEDx talk by the author will also give you a good glimpse of this concept. Do take a look:

Reading this book gave me a new level of freedom. I highly recommend this book to help solve the hostage situations in your life, if any.