M.J. Blehart's Blog, page 30

Did You Know That Your Identity Is Largely Artificial?

Your identity is labeled via artifice mostly tied to your egoic self.Photo by Cristofer Maximilian on Unsplash

Identity is complex. How you identify yourself varies depending on circumstances and situations.

Student. Parent. Child. Friend. Lover. Coworker. Boss. Man. Woman. No matter which of these apply, they seldom apply all at once. And what’s more – all of them are artificial.

Additionally, your identity will change constantly. Some of that change is wholly under your control. But much of it will be viewed and commented on by outside forces.

For example – my wife didn’t take my surname when we married. Worse, despite her politely asking them not to, some of her relatives have addressed things to us with her identified not just by my surname, but without her own first name. Yes, as you might imagine, this has gone over poorly.

Identity tends to get tied up in ego. Which adds to its utter artifice.

Please allow me to elaborate.

The ego and artifice

You are made up of a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. The subconscious mind runs on rote and routine and often isn’t fully engaged. But in your subconscious mind your beliefs, values, and habits live.

Your conscious mind is your present, aware, awake mind. When you’re consciously aware, you’re mindful. That mindfulness informs you, here and now, about who, what, where, how, and why you are.

This is why the notion of “woke” being considered in any way bad utterly baffles me.

For all sorts of reasons that I’m not going to detail thoroughly here, people tend to live largely by rote and routine. But in a nutshell, distractions, obligations, and societal norms tend to push people to live mostly subconsciously as such.

However, everyone experiences periods of being mindful and consciously aware. During those periods, they form an impression of themselves based on bridging the conscious and subconscious minds.

The construct that comes of that is the ego. The ego, thus, is how you project yourself to the world without, and simultaneously reflect yourself back within yourself.

Your ego and your identity often align.

There’s a problem, however, that comes about if you mostly live subconsciously. Your ego holds onto a truth about you formed in the past. That’s how you identify. But if you haven’t been consciously aware, mindful, and living in the now more than by rote and routine, you will find yourself conflicted.

Why? Because change is the one and only constant in the Universe. Because you change – sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but always – who you were isn’t who you are.

The notion of “who” is identity. That’s why it’s tied to ego – and why it tends to be wholly artificial.

Hence why living mindfully, in the now, is empowering. Because it bypasses the ego.

Mindfulness, the now, and identity

Unlike your subconscious mind – and its constantly running programs – your conscious mind can only be engaged in the now.

Your subconscious mind is like your smartphone. It’s always on, is full of memory and apps, and just is most of the time. Your conscious mind is like a game app on your smartphone. Unless you’re using it, here and now, it’s mostly inactive.

Your conscious awareness – conscious mind – functions entirely in the present. It’s a product of the here and now. The more you engage it, the more you gain control of the only thing you truly can control.

You.

Specifically – your mindset/headspace/psyche self. That control comes from recognizing your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. And then, after recognition, changing them if they’re not suiting you.

Remember, the only person in your head, heart, and soul is YOU. Nobody else is in there – so nobody but you can control, live with, alter, or change what that entails.

Mindfulness is how you assume the control that’s rightfully yours.

How? Becoming consciously aware, here and now, is as easy as asking questions like,

What am I thinking?What am I feeling?How am I feeling?What am I doing?Why am I doing what I’m doing?What are my intentions?

These and similar questions can be asked and answered only here and now. They are wholly of the present – which engages your conscious awareness.

Because of the immediacy of these questions, the artifice of identity takes a backseat. Further, being in the now exposes false identifiers you might be using.

Of course, it’s not that easy. The ego will resist.

Photo by Orkun Azap on UnsplashThe ego, comfort zones, and resistance to change

The ego, when created at some point in the past, settled into a comfort zone. It presented you with a place that made you feel stable – thus creating a comfort zone.

However – as I wrote previously – comfort zones aren’t truly comfortable. They’re not about comfort. They’re actually about stability and familiarity.

That’s why comfort zones are often places that are not comfortable.

What’s more – the identity that your ego holds onto might have been true for only a brief moment. But it became a comfort zone, and how you identified yourself.

And it might have been deeply negative.

For example, following a break-up and conscious awareness of it, you might have formed an identity as a bad lover, unlovable, unworthy, and all kinds of negatives. That identity became part of your ego – and has stuck ever since.

Not comfortable – but still a comfort zone. And the ego is all about comfort zones.

Ever hear or say: That’s who I am. That’s who I’ve always been. I’m too set in my ways to change. I’ve always been bad at ‘x’. No matter what I do I can’t win. And so on? That’s your ego telling you lies.

If you have ever experienced brain weasels (or squirrels in the brain) – those tiny, nagging voices tell you more or less that you suck – can you see how they look just like your ego? Guess where they come from?

Egos hate and fear change. Why? Because change kills them.

Your ego is artificial. When you recognize this – you become empowered to live with conscious awareness and change it actively. This will, inevitably, kill your ego.

Can you see why those who disempower – or try selling you things – tend to do so by taking aim at identity and thus ego?

Your true identity is fluid

Who you are, deep in your heart of hearts, is rooted in your subconscious mind – not your ego. And unless you maliciously act to hurt people, take and give nothing back, or via malice of forethought cause harm to others – you’re a good person. You desire to have kindness, compassion, and empathy in your life.

This is why gender is fluid. Because apart from your sex organs, your identity as any given gender is an artifice based on the standards of society. And thus, not something real.

Then who are you? That’s a fluid question. Because you’re constantly changing over time, with new experiences, among different people, and so on. The egoic identity most of us point to – within and without – is largely artificial.

Who you truly are is a being of pure energy. You’re like flowing water, shifting and changing and in constant motion. Your true identity, beneath it all, is a miracle of science and metaphysics combined.

The identity you call yourself by also shifts depending on who you’re interacting with. That lends itself to the added artifice of your ego – because it’s made up based on factors you can’t and don’t control.

When you know that your identity is largely artificial – and tied to your equally artificial ego – you can use conscious awareness to actively change. Despite egoic resistance, mindfulness puts you in the driver’s seat.

Finally – know that you are worthy and deserving of an identity that makes you empowered and content. It’s not easy – but utterly worth it to be more mindful and empowered – and in control of your one and only life in your physical body, here and now.

Can you see how your identity is largely artificial and comes from your equally artificial ego?

This is the five hundred and eighty-second exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – using mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.

Please take a moment to subscribe to my mailing list. Fill in the info then click the sign-up button to the right and receive your free eBook. Thank you!

The post Did You Know That Your Identity Is Largely Artificial? appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

Why Is Knowledge as Empowerment Important to You and Me?

Because only via empowerment do you and I have genuine, positive control.Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

I’m always learning something new. And I revel in that.

I learn in different ways from different resources. That includes other people, books, experiences, places, and sometimes combinations of all the above. The lessons are equally as variable.

You probably know of Sir Francis Bacon’s statement, “knowledge itself is power” as “knowledge is power.” But I think that missed the mark because “power” is an obscure, often abused notion.

What’s more, you see far too many examples of people seeking “power” to control, dominate, and do selfish, terrible, unkind, and uncompassionate things.

However, the statement itself is true from a personal perspective. But not in that obscure, vague, frequently misused impression of power. Rather, it’s about empowerment.

Knowledge is empowerment.

Learning in its purest form has nothing to do with control, dominance, and knowledge to do anything at all outside of yourself. It’s about what you gain and can do with that knowledge to advance your life experience in a meaningful way for yourself.

The more you open yourself to learning, the more empowerment you gain. When you’re more empowered, you are more self-reliant. Self-reliance leads to greater equal footing for all.

Those who seek “power” in the sense of business and government leaders recognize the truth of this. That’s why they frequently go out of their way to “protect” knowledge – keep the people ignorant, keep them disempowered. Banning books, for example, is never about “protecting” the young or similar bullshit – it’s about maintaining the status quo.

However, you have a choice. You have the ability to be empowered and do amazing things. Learning is key in this endeavor.

Learning is empowering

As an avid reader, I devour books. One of the best parts of my day is my 30-60 minutes of reading first thing every morning. I’m always reading 2 books at a time – 1 fiction, and 1 nonfiction. And I find myself learning new things from both.

But this is just one small part of my learning experience. I also learn through simple interactions.

Whenever you are with other people, they teach you things. Sometimes this is utterly subtle (and largely lost on you) and passive. Sometimes it’s blatant and active. For example – attending a panel, talk, or lecture is all about active learning.

As much as I know about various topics that interest me, there is far, far more that I don’t know. Some people become distraught at this notion. I love it because it means there’s always something new to be learned.

Having just attended a con, I both sat on and sat in multiple panels. There was some amazing and useful information gleaned from all that, and processing is going to take some time. The lectures I attended were both wonderfully presented and informative.

Learning improves my work as a writer and storyteller. But there is a downside – and that’s realizing that new things you learn might conflict with what you already know. And that is where “power” is often weaponized over empowerment.

Knowledge as empowerment over power

Change is the one and only constant in the Universe. But many people find that difficult to accept because change frequently causes conflict between what you know and what you knew. That conflict can be extremely disconcerting, particularly among people who learn more subtly and passively than blatantly and actively.

You probably know someone who felt they stopped learning things after formal schooling. After classrooms, lectures, and homework, active learning ended. You also likely see those people as stubborn, opinionated, and maybe even sheeple. Ignorance is bliss – save when it’s not, which tends to be nearly always when you get right down to it.

In part, because of new things I learned, I’m struggling to share this. Why? Because I find myself straddling an invisible, thin line between lecturing and sharing. Rather than offering self-help platitudes and my-way-is-the-best-way BS, I’m seeking to only share this idea for you to explore it on your own, in your own way.

That’s what empowerment is. Nobody can give it to you, nor can you take it from anyone. Rather, you give it to yourself by choosing it.

Even passive learning, when you apply mindfulness to it, can empower you. That’s because mindfulness is conscious awareness of your own thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. When you use your conscious awareness consciously, in the now, the passive becomes active. Thus, you can learn from it – and allow it to empower you.

Power is often abused by those who think they have it to disempower and control what they have no true control over. Unless it’s ceded to them – which disempowerment does.

Convoluted? No, not really. But you need to be open to learning and the conflict that might ensue.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on UnsplashThe conflict and negativity, positivity, and neutrality

Everything that you learn in and of itself is neutral. The thing you learn is just that – a thing. It doesn’t matter what that is – it is. And in simply being, it’s neutral.

What you do with what you learn directs negativity and positivity. But that begins from the place between the extremes. That will be different for you than it is for me because our perceptions of reality are vastly different (even when they’re similar).

Likewise, both of us exist between any given extremes. Good and bad, large and small, wise and foolish, positive and negative, etc. Those extremes aren’t opposite sides of coins with narrow spaces between them. They’re opposite sides of a cylinder, which itself is flexible (because extremes are often flexible themselves. Yesterday’s good can be tomorrow’s bad through no actions of your own).

One of the greatest things about empowerment is the control you have over how you direct what you learn. Positive, negative, or neutral? You choose.

One important caveat – neutrality doesn’t empower. When it just is, it does nothing. That’s why remaining neutral in the face of overwhelming negativity will inevitably leave you disempowered.

Empowerment is a choice. And not making a choice – though a choice itself – doesn’t activate it and anything you might gain from it.

Learning gives me new ideas to work with. I choose to share these things with you because I desire for you to be more able to empower yourself. Knowledge is empowerment – when you choose to make use of learning.

Why bother? Because who but you is experiencing your life for you?

Recognizing how knowledge is empowering isn’t hard

It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct your actions.

When you take the things that you are learning – passively or actively – and mindfully examine them, you choose how to direct them. Knowing that what you learn is neutral – and you can choose to direct it positively or negatively – you can use that to make your life experience better, more exciting, engaging, and ultimately how you desire it to be.

This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you. Then that can expand to change the bigger picture matters, too.

Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts matters in a way to open more dialogue. In that form, you can explore and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.

Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.

Lastly, the better aware you are of yourself in the now, the more you can do to choose and decide how your life experiences will be. When that empowers you, it can also open those around you to their empowerment.

To me, that’s a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share.

Thank you for coming along on this journey.

This is the four hundred and seventy-first entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.

Please visit here to explore all my published works – both fiction and non-fiction.

Please take a moment to sign up for my newsletter. Fill in the info and click the submit button to the right and receive a free eBook.

The post Why Is Knowledge as Empowerment Important to You and Me? appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

Why Make Choices for Everything That’s in Your Life’s Paths?

Because when you make choices, you take control.Photo by Beth MacDonald courtesy of Unsplash

From the moment you wake up, you’re making choices in and for your life’s paths.

Hit the snooze or get out of bed? Pee or feed the cats? Drink a glass of water or start the coffee? Shower now, later, or not at all?

Though they might seem utterly mundane and insignificant – they still matter. Why? Because they’ll impact everything else you do today.

Hit snooze, and you might doze off and run late as such. Don’t shower? You might find you offend yourself with your body odor later in the day and make choices based on that. All choices accumulate, and all the little choices you make day in and day out add up to bigger things.

What’s more, when you choose not to choose, you cede control. That means that the unexpected can easily sneak up on you and catch you flatfooted.

True, that can happen even when you make choices. But when you don’t, it’s going to be more difficult. Why? Because if you’ve been living by rote, routine, and habit – subconsciously – choices have still been made. They were just passive.

Until a thing occurs that brings them to your conscious awareness.

Not making choices is a choice. But it’s one of cessation of control to happenstance and circumstances.

That might be just fine sometimes. But, again, it all accumulates. Eventually, not choosing has consequences.

The consequences of not choosing

What are the consequences that occur when you don’t make choices? That depends on you, your life, and how those unmade choices impact your experience.

Sometimes it’s immediate in the face of something happening. When you didn’t choose to pursue that goal – and your coworker did and gets promoted – that’ll impact you in that moment.

Other times, it comes on slowly but ineffably. A sense of regret, dissatisfaction, longing, and lamenting this, that, or the other thing you didn’t choose. When you wistfully reflect on a choice you didn’t make, its impact can lead to discontent and regret.

You and I each get one shot in our bodies. That means you get one shot at this life experience. And it is an experience. But what that looks like is a reflection of the choices you do and don’t make.

Big or small, choices have an impact. Sometimes it’s not felt until later. Other times, it hits you quickly. Sometimes it has both impacts.

For example, on November 30, 1999, I chose to walk the quarter mile to the post office rather than drive. That choice ended up with me getting hit by a car crossing a street. And that’s why I spent weeks in a hospital, then a rehab hospital, and had multiple surgeries. Now I have 3 titanium plates holding my right clavicle together and a fused tibia/fibula in my right leg.

This is an extreme example, of course. But not choosing means you place limitations on your life experiences.

When you make choices, the outcome is always variable

The choice I made that November afternoon would impact my life in ways I had no idea it could. All I thought I was choosing was between getting some exercise or being lazy.

While it sucked a lot at the time, the net impact of that choice has been positive. How? Because I came to understand how fragile life is, that the unexpected can and will hit you (maybe literally), and making the most of this experience called life is more worthwhile than merely enduring it.

Who I am today is a result of that choice. And that’s something I see as having been beneficial.

Not all choices are going to have that sort of impact. But there will always be an outcome. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes indifferent as fuck.

But choosing to make choices is empowering. Because you decide that you will act to do something. Maybe it’s getting out of bed and choosing the gym over goofing off online. At the time, you might not like that choice’s outcome. But later, when you feel better physically, mentally, and emotionally – the outcome shows its worth to you.

The inconsequential is never inconsequential when actively chosen. Because active choice gives you control.

You, and you alone, control your head, heart, and soul. You’re the only one in control of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. Yes, they might be influenced by outside forces – but they’re yours to drive and control.

When you don’t choose to take control, you disempower yourself.

Photo by Sam Mgrdichian courtesy of UnsplashLiving passively disempowers you

It’s far too easy to live passively. Between distractions like streaming services, social media, and smartphones, we increasingly put off or neglect to make choices.

Some of these are big, some small. But size matters not. This is about living passively rather than living actively.

I believe that a lot of the reason why we have the mental health crises we do today stems from not making choices. Or more specifically, only making choices passively.

Look at how many people don’t vote. What about all the people who refuse to form opinions on important topics? How many people do you know who are miserable in their jobs, relationships, families, homes, and the like? How much of that misery stems from not actively making choices?

When you choose not to actively make choices you cede your power. And your control. Then, you find yourself discontent, distressed, anxious, and depressed.

Some might tell me I’m being unfair. Perhaps. But is life ever fair? No, not really. But how you approach it – positively or negatively, actively or passively, with trepidation or zeal – informs your experience. But nobody teaches you that in school – that’s only a result of life experience.

And – it’s a result of making choices.

Making choices is your superpower

The vast majority of the rest of the animal kingdom on this planet largely cares only about food, shelter, survival, and propagation of the species. Humans, however, can make far deeper and more complex choices.

No other animal has the devices you’re reading this on. There aren’t other animals who can choose jobs around the globe, what environment to live in, or communicate instantly with anyone anywhere. That most unique quality in humanity has all been built from active choices made.

Actively making choices empowers you. And that’s a superpower you can control to impact what kind of day, week, year, and overall life you will have.

Yes, random happenstance and the unexpected will occur. But when you make choices, you can control what results from these.

You are so very much more powerful than you realize. Making choices actively, regularly, employs your power. And that can show you what paths in life and other options are available.

Sometimes, yes, making choices passively is a respite. But frequent passive choosing rather than making choices actively disempowers you.

Wouldn’t you use superpowers if you had them? Making choices is a superpower. And you get to choose to actively use it to benefit your life every day. Put on your super suit and go kick boldly down your chosen path.

Do you actively make choices on a regular basis?

This is the five hundred and eighty-first exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – using mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.

Please take a moment to subscribe to my mailing list. Fill in the info then click the sign-up button to the right and receive your free eBook. Thank you!

The post Why Make Choices for Everything That’s in Your Life’s Paths? appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

How is Positivity Not the Same as Positive Thinking?

Because genuine, non-toxic positivity isn’t just thought.Photo by Julia Caesar on Unsplash

In my quest to better myself and live my life as fully as possible. I’ve listened to and read numerous self-help, empowerment, manifestation, and similar books, audiobooks, podcasts, and the like.

I’ve read, analyzed, and even absorbed a wide range of information – both useful and less than useful. My studies have included the spiritual, philosophical, psychological, educational, scientific, and everything in between.

A key trope I’ve seen over and over again in the non-scientific realm is positive thinking. Again and again, they tell you that if you put enough positive thought out into the Universe, you can manifest anything your heart desires.

The notion that thought can be used to control the universe nearly always begins with positive thinking. Whether it’s 1952’s The Power of Positive Thinking by Normal Vincent Peale, the 1937 Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, or Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 film and book sensation The Secret – the message is the same. Positive thinking will manifest incredible results into your life.

Some dismiss all of these as hokum. Bullshit. Grade-A snake oil. Having read 2 of these, I believe that they have merit to a degree – but it requires critical thinking. That’s because you must get past the rah-rah think-it-and-you’ll-manifest-it idealization to reap any benefit from it.

What does that mean? It means that you need to know that thought is not all there is to anything and everything in the Universe.

You are not thought alone

Every single human being on Planet Earth – all 8 billion of us – is not made of thought alone. You also have feelings, instincts, beliefs, values, and habits that thought only gives names to.

It’s important to be aware of your thoughts. But thought in and of itself barely touches the surface of your being.

If you don’t also address your feelings, and beyond them your habits and beliefs, you sure as hell can’t use thought to control – let alone change – anything.

What’s more, there’s a difference between passive and active thinking.

Lots of passive thoughts run through your head – much like the music in the background of most bars and restaurants. By and large, you pay it no attention. Yet every now and then you notice it. That song you love or that tune you can’t stand, your consciousness drifting and the background music suddenly swelling into the foreground, or something else draws your attention to it.

Passive thought is utterly out of your control. Because it’s passive, you’re barely aware of it. Often, when you do take a look at that passive thought, you might dismiss it as useless to you. Or you might actively start to examine it for efficacy.

Whatever the case may be – thought isn’t all that goes into what makes you, you – or your life, your life.

Positive thinking is not positivity

Positive thinking tends to be about focusing on maintaining only positive thoughts. It’s all about not allowing negativity, distress, or anything other than positive thoughts to dominate your being.

Many of the narratives about positive thinking people encounter go a step further, implying – or even saying outright – that allowing negativity or negative thoughts to enter your mind causes you to fail. Or to otherwise find new and interesting ways to fuck it all up.

This is where toxic positivity comes in. Because the notion that you should never deal with negativity and focus only on positivity is toxic. And it’s bullshit, too.

Positivity is not positive thinking. First, because it’s not thought. Yes, thought is a part of positivity. But genuine positivity is a matter of conscious awareness – mindfulness.

That means that positivity is a product of feeling, intention, action, and thought.

What’s more, genuine positivity isn’t all or nothing. It’s an attitude, an approach, a choice. Genuine positivity recognizes and acknowledges negativity, that bad things and shit happens, and that your control is wholly limited to your conscious awareness of your feelings, actions, intentions, and thoughts.

Positivity is choosing to not be a victim, to walk away when you need, to let go, to find the good in the bad, and any lessons therein.

You can’t just think things and make them real. Manifestation isn’t possible – unless you take actions along with your intentions to have, be, and do what you are seeking to make or make happen.

Work, effort, focus, and action – consciously enacted – with an inclination towards positivity is necessary.

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on UnsplashThis can only ever work for you and you alone

Another largely misunderstood element from unscientific self-help works is that you can change the world. On the one hand, you can – BUT – on the other hand, only when it comes to yourself.

You can’t make anyone else do anything. It’s impossible to think, feel, act, or intend for anyone else. No matter how badly you might want them to – you cannot control them AT ALL.

As a writer, I’d like more people to read my blogs and buy my books. I can do marketing, sales, promotions, and take other steps to get them sold. But I can’t make anyone buy anything.

That’s because I have zero control over anyone or anything other than myself.

And you have the same zero control over anyone other than yourself.

The Secret tells you to “ask, believe, receive” to make anything you desire happen. What it utterly leaves out is that you can’t create from the void. There must be effort and work, action and intention on your part. And you can’t make anyone else do anything whatsoever. That includes the Universe.

Is it all bullshit? No. There are in these works nuggets of wisdom to be found. Almost all of them are about self-awareness, mindfulness, and conscious reality creation.

BUT – and this is important – conscious reality creation is only about your personal reality. Because how you perceive reality is wholly on you and you alone. You can use conscious awareness to change your reality and/or apply conscious reality creation as such.

Positivity comes into play because it’s the attitude you take. It’s a builder, a creator – where negativity is a destroyer and a discourager.

Positive thinking is not positivity. Recognizing this empowers you to employ genuine positivity to better your life experience and cope with shit that happens along the way.

Recognizing positive thinking versus positivity isn’t hard

It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct your actions.

When you employ positive thinking alone, you set yourself up to get hurt because positive thinking is not the whole package – and can easily lead to toxic positivity. Knowing that genuine positivity is connected to conscious awareness and beyond thought alone, you can use this attitude to keep moving forward when life is extra challenging.

This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you. Then that can expand to change the bigger picture matters, too.

Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts matters in a way to open more dialogue. In that form, you can explore and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.

Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.

Lastly, the better aware you are of yourself in the now, the more you can do to choose and decide how your life experiences will be. When that empowers you, it can also open those around you to their empowerment.

To me, that’s a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share.

Thank you for coming along on this journey.

This is the four hundred and seventieth entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.

Please visit here to explore all my published works – both fiction and non-fiction.

Please take a moment to sign up for my newsletter. Fill in the info and click the submit button to the right and receive a free eBook.

The post How is Positivity Not the Same as Positive Thinking? appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

Do You Choose to Live Your Life in Fear or Reason?

Living in fear is a choice – even when it doesn’t feel like it.Photo by Minha Baek on Unsplash

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a surreal experience. And it’s changed the world – not for the better.

Maybe it was ultimately unavoidable that COVID would become a darker, nastier influenza. Speculating on the “what ifs?” is moot because you can’t undo, redo, or change the past.

The unfortunate reality is that COVID is here to stay. You can take all the precautions in the world – but unless you utterly isolate and hide away from life – the odds of not getting COVID are stunningly low.

Vaccinations do not prevent the disease. But they DO make it far less likely to kill you. Vaccinations most likely will keep you from having a case so severe that you would need to be hospitalized.

Like it or not, COVID is here to stay. Even with all the deaths and those who are less fortunate and wind up with long-COVID and related ongoing medical issues, it’s going to remain with us for the rest of our lifetimes.

The level of fear that COVID sparked in the world is surreal. When we already live in a fear-based society, the added fear COVID brought on has been distressing and devastating on many levels.

It’s created a divide between people as the constant, ongoing struggle to keep transmission levels low, masking, and levels of necessary precautions spark debates. The anger of those who feel anybody not masking is an asshole is equal to the anger of those who feel mask-wearers are assholes.

All of it drives fear to new heights. And that gets so embedded in your psyche that you don’t realize that you DO have a choice.

You choose to live in fear

While too much of the messaging of our society reflects that it’s fear-based, you and I still have a choice.

You can live in fear. Or you can live in reason.

The opposite of fear isn’t fearlessness. It’s reason. It’s the ability to look at what you fear and say, “It’s bad, but it’s not going to dictate my life experience.” Then, you apply reason – not reckless abandon – to counter the fear.

Some people, in the post-pandemic world of today, remain uber-isolated. They avoid gatherings and crowds, mask everywhere they go, and actively choose to remain apart. This is not a judgment – it’s recognition of this truth.

You can’t think, feel, intend, or act for anyone other than yourself. Hence, you can’t know if the choice to remain uber-isolated was made as a result of fear or reason. You only get to choose that for yourself.

You choose if you live in fear.

It’s not an easy choice. And it’s also never one-and-done. You make that choice with anything and everything you do.

Yes, you might decide to go to the grocery store, not wear a mask, and risk getting COVID. Believe it or not, you might decide to go the grocery store, wear a mask, and still risk getting COVID. While masking has at least a minute effect on transmission – it’s far more of a psychological one.

Aware of this, I’m reasoning to choose to still wear a mask when I go shopping or am in any smaller enclosed space with a lot of strangers. But on the other side of that coin – in a gathering of friends and the familiar, I’m less likely to mask.

That choice, on my part, is to live in reason rather than in fear.

Fear, reason, and what you can and can’t control

This is going to be a very blunt statement. When all is said and done – unless you choose to take your own life – you can’t control when, how, or where you will die. But you will die.

Sorry, that’s the truth of your existence. You live and you die. Death is inevitable. And it’s often the single greatest fear many suffer.

Fear of death has stayed the hand of many and kept them from living. And by that, I mean active, intentional living – rather than merely existing.

That’s the difference. Everyone exists. Not everyone lives.

How does that work? In the simplest terms, it comes down to active choice. Do you make active decisions to do or not do things – or live passively and just let life happen to you?

Everyone makes active decisions along the way. You can’t not do so because nobody can live purely passively. But apart from seemingly inconsequential active choices, many don’t take the wheel and steer life how they might desire to.

Why? For some, I think it’s fear of getting it wrong. That’s stayed my hand more than once. For others, fear of failure. I suspect, most of all, it’s about fear of the unknown.

To some, the very little you genuinely control in this life is disconcerting. Like the odds of contracting COVID, you have zero control. I’ve gotten all the vaccinations, mask regularly, maintain social distancing – and I still got COVID at the end of 2022.

What I did choose was to live my life. I took new precautions, increased my situational awareness – and the uncontrollable still hit.

But because I made the active choices that I did, I have no regrets. And now that I’ve had COVID, I’m still making active choices rather than letting fear dictate my life.

Photo by Wil Stewart on UnsplashWhy does the choice matter?

The choice matters because you get one shot at this life. You choose – every day – how actively or passively you live.

Are you actively choosing reason or fear? Or are you passively merely existing and allowing fear to dominate?

Because odds are, if you are merely existing – you do so in fear. Not because you chose to do so – but rather, because this fear-based society dominates the subconscious mind and society’s collective consciousness.

How? Messages of lack, scarcity, and insufficiency are your constant companions. Consumerism and our capitalist society sells you shit you don’t need by convincing you that you should fear what you miss out on if you don’t buy. When you merely exist, you are much more likely to be a victim.

If you are assaulted, raped, robbed, or fall ill, you are a victim in that moment. After the moment passes, however – and some of you won’t appreciate this statement in the least – the choice is yours.

Live in fear and stay a victim – or – Live in reason and be unbroken.

It doesn’t always feel like you do, in fact, have a choice. But you do. How long it takes to recognize and act on that, however, is as variable as you and I are.

The choice matters because it dictates if you let fear move you or use reason to move yourself. Yes, sometimes you will just go with the flow and merely exist. But you always can make active choices. That’s your superpower.

And you are worthy and deserving of employing it.

Your life matters more than you know

You, your life, and your choices matter.

It’s easy to feel unimportant and insignificant in the world. That’s a result of living in a fear-based society. But because of the stigma attached to mental health, it’s often disregarded or shunted to the side.

You have every right to live your life as you see fit. But when you choose to live in fear, you choose to cede your power to it. Fear will keep you disempowered. But it won’t keep you safe.

And that’s the long and short of it. Fear – when it was a matter of life and death in the days of humankind being hunter-gatherers – kept you safe. Fear – when it’s intangible and frequently measuring against other people and intangibles – keeps you disempowered. But not safe.

Humans evolved, and while fear evolved – it also didn’t. Facing fear has become increasingly avoided – look at all the trigger warnings given so people can do exactly that – rather than faced.

But avoiding it doesn’t remove it.

The only way to counter fear is via reason. And that comes from mindfulness of yourself. That conscious awareness – here and now – is active knowledge of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. Ultimately, that empowers you and lets you choose reason.

As scary as the world can be – how much you let it scare you is a choice you make. And your life and choosing to live it on your terms matters more than you know. Why? Because you’re here, now, to give this world your gifts.

You’re a superhero. Your power is choice. And you get to use it every day. Don’t shy from that – revel in it.

That’s why I choose and share my Pathwalking life philosophy. It’s my gift to share actively and mindfully.

What do you choose – live in passive fear or active reason?

This is the five-hundred-and-eightieth exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – using mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.

Please take a moment to subscribe to my mailing list. Fill in the info then click the sign-up button to the right and receive your free eBook. Thank you!

The post Do You Choose to Live Your Life in Fear or Reason? appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

How is Love the Most Positive Emotion That There Is?

Because love is both bigger and simpler than you think and feel that it is.Photo by Micah Hallahan on Unsplash

Shopping at the grocery store, I saw that all the Valentine’s candy was on display. Chocolate hearts everywhere.

Valentine’s Day is my least favorite holiday. The reasons are many, and frankly inconsequential to this story – save one. Love is falsely represented by Valentine’s Day.

How’s that? Everywhere you look, Valentine’s Day celebrates relationships, intimacy, romance, and various other notions of overblown, romantic love. It implies – and sometimes outright says – that this is the most important love that you can have.

This notion of romantic love isn’t just the purview of Valentine’s Day. Tons of books, TV shows, movies, and scripted programming across other media puts the notion of it on a pedestal. All of them claim that it’s the ultimate achievement, and without it you’re nothing.

This often leads to another utterly surreal place. A whole genre of media exists around broken hearts and people who have been hurt by love. It has broken them, they can never love again, and blah, blah, blah.

This is where it all goes off the rails. Why? Because real love – the truth of what it is at its core – can never cause hurt or harm. It is always a positive emotion.

But like many things in the world – love often gets mistaken for other emotions and ideas.

What is love?

Defining love is something people have been seeking for all of time. Unfortunately, a great many ideas and emotions related to it get called love – and that’s where the mix-ups begin.

At its ultimate core, it is a creator. It’s a force of empowerment that fulfills purposes both simple and complex.

Love is life itself.

Really, it’s that easy. Life is a product of it – whether it’s the rain and sun growing plants, the passing of genetic material to grow animals, or air and water molecules forming clouds. Love is life.

However, this isn’t entirely literal.

Nearly anything that has life is love. This can include music, books, ideas, dreams, and more. It is free thought, color, imagination, anything, and everything that you can use to create.

When you create you are bringing it into the world. You grow knowledge and understanding and build upon what you know. The more you know the more you can teach and spread the love.

What about bad creations? With few exceptions, even creations used for bad had a loving intent. Expansion of knowledge can come with a terrible price – and before you know it, there’s a new destructive force in the world. However – unless the intent is hateful and/or destructive, the creation is one of love.

Love is simple. It’s the sun in the sky, water at your feet, air in your lungs. Truly, it is life itself.

How does this get confused?

Many of the notions of love are not about love itself – but other emotions and ideas that might begin as it but evolve (or arguably devolve) into something else.

What emotions and ideas are these? Lust, possession, obsession, jealousy, fear, ideas of a soulmate/twin flame, “the one”, perfectionism, and more.

When any of the above gets tied into love – is it any wonder it appears that it can include pain? More than one of these notions is full of potential to set you up for failure.

How?

Let’s start with lust. Lust can feel like love, and it can be part of lust. But they are wholly separate notions. Lust draws in other thoughts and feelings beyond love itself.

Possession and obsession? Both start as love – but love is free. It can’t be caged or held in one place and unchanging. Sorry, that’s just not real – and it’s not love.

The ideas of a soulmate or “the one”? To be fair, sure, this could be legit for some. But it is not just romantic, idealized love. Of course, you can fall in love with someone and share your whole existence with them. But that goes past it into other connections. This notion is tied to other ideas and emotions beyond love itself.

It is a force of positivity and good.  But when you tag other emotions and ideas onto it – often, involving intimate relationships – that’s where it gets confused. And you mistake another emotion or idea as love being the cause of pain. But the cause of pain isn’t love – it’s the other emotions that are mistaken for it.

Love, at its core, does no harm. It’s an ultimate force of good and positivity in the world. It gets confused when mixed with these other ideas and emotions.

Photo by Thomas Couillard on UnsplashIt is both simple and defies a simple explanation

Love goes beyond thought and feeling. It’s more than idea and emotion. I could argue that it’s probably the first idea and emotion in the universe.

How? It is a force of creation. Whether you believe in God creating the Universe in 7 days, the Big Bang Theory, another creation story, or some combination of many – it all led to you and me. Creations borne of love in its truest form.

Wait a sec. Hold the phone. Did this just get too esoteric? Too hooky-spooky? Maybe it is. But everything I’ve ever read about religion, spirituality, conscious reality creation, mindfulness, and all else on these lines references love the same way. It is a force of ultimate positivity. It’s a force that gets attached to others – I think in part because it’s too simple to be believable.

As humankind grows, evolves, and develops greater technologies, we reject the simple. Look at how people lived just a hundred years ago and see how many elements of that lifestyle you’d likely reject today for being too simple.

But simple doesn’t mean it isn’t right and/or good. Love is both simple and defies a simple explanation – much like all the great questions of life, the universe, and everything do.

And that is how it is the most positive emotion that there is. Because it’s an ultimate creator and can empower phenomenal things from a simple source.

Recognizing that love is ultimately very simple isn’t hard

It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct your actions.

When you pause and see that love, in and of itself, is a force of pure positivity – and negatives attached to it are different emotions or ideas – you can accept and do more with it. Knowing that it’s a simple force of creativity for good, you can seek to both get more and give more to the world to expand it and its positive influences.

This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you. Then that can expand to change the bigger picture matters, too.

Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts matters in a way to open more dialogue. In that form, you can explore and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.

Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.

Lastly, the better aware you are of yourself in the now, the more you can do to choose and decide how your life experiences will be. When that empowers you, it can also open those around you to their empowerment.

To me, that’s a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share.

Thank you for coming along on this journey.

This is the four hundred-and-sixty-ninth entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.

Please visit here to explore all my published works – both fiction and non-fiction.

Please take a moment to sign up for my newsletter. Fill in the info and click the submit button to the right and receive a free eBook.

The post How is Love the Most Positive Emotion That There Is? appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

Are You More Capable Than You Allow Yourself to Recognize?

Odds are you’re more capable than you know.Photo by Sam Mgrdichian on Unsplash

Arguably, everyone has limitations. This varies from person to person.

These can range from the physical to the emotional to the mental to the spiritual – and combinations of all. What you can and can’t do is frequently part of your focus.

The physical tends to be the most limiting. These meat-popsicles that people occupy are prone to lots of annoying issues that impact what you can and can’t do in them. Also, if you have t-rex arms like I do, your reach is not the same as someone a foot taller than you are – and you can’t do anything about that.

However, when it comes to the mental, emotional, and spiritual – you’re very nearly unlimited.

Yet the nature of our society – and its fear base – creates a ludicrous amount of lack, scarcity, and insufficiency. Most of which are wholly artificial.

Much of this is messages about all the things you’re not capable of. And you’re not capable of them because you lack ‘X’, haven’t enough of ‘Y’, or an insufficiency of ‘Z’ that limit you. When these messages bombard you frequently, your subconscious mind absorbs them like a sponge.

Many physical limitations aren’t as limiting as they could be. But the places where capability tends to be far more than any limitations are in the realm of mental, emotional, and spiritual matters.

And the truth is that you’re more capable than you allow yourself to recognize.

How and why are you more capable?

For this section and the rest of this discussion going forward, I’m combining the mental, emotional, and spiritual all together as mental health.

One of the biggest advantages of the modern world is the internet. When you get past the cat videos, the porn, the fake news sites, and the like – there is a ton of good, useful, helpful information to be found.

There are numerous ways to grow, evolve, and change that you can research online. Many resources are available to gain competencies, further education, and overall knowledge about nearly anything and everything you can conceive of.

If you have a deep desire to do a thing – you can do it. When it comes to your mental health you have total and complete control over all elements of it.

It might not be as simple as flipping a switch or changing an idea. This could require help from books, online resources, friends, family, medication, therapy, and/or all of the above.

Therapists help you to find balance and gain clarity. Psychopharmacology does the same by affecting imbalanced chemicals in your brain that might cause depression, anxiety, ADD, OCD, and the like.

Choosing to work with these resources is your superpower. And when you do choose – you push past limitations – real, fear-based, and/or imagined.

Because you have this power over your mental health, you are more capable than you likely realize.

The first step to working with this is believing in yourself.

Believe in yourself

Lots of people find this challenging. It’s even more so when you deal with self-doubt, imposter syndrome, squirrels in the brain/brain weasels, and the like from within.

Then, this gets further complicated by outside influences telling you that you can’t, won’t, don’t, or shouldn’t.

Many things make self-belief challenging. And that also limits how much you believe that you’re capable of. Often, it’s the lack of self-belief or limitations in self-belief that cause you to think you’re not as capable as you are.

But the truth is that you’re extremely capable. Like far more capable than you tend to immediately believe. To access this, however, you start by you believing in yourself.

What does that even mean? It means you believe you have lots of capabilities but are also willing to take chances and leaps of faith and try new things.

Doing anything new, different, and in any way outside of your comfort zone requires a leap of faith. And that further requires you to believe in yourself.

How? Look at the proof of past success.

Photo by Jennifer Capel on UnsplashYou’ve been more capable before

With nearly no exceptions that I can conceive of, everyone at one time or another has done something they didn’t think, feel, or believe that they could do. Everyone has proven themselves to be more capable at one time or another.

And I can prove it to you.

You passed that test you didn’t think you’d be able to pass. A date happened you didn’t think you were capable of getting – because you took a chance and asked someone out. You signed on that dotted line and bought the house/car/boat or another thing you didn’t think you’d ever have. That goal you set for yourself that you didn’t believe you were capable of you achieved.

How long it took, when it happened, and how it happened is irrelevant. It has happened. And it will happen again. Why? Because you are more capable than you allow yourself to recognize.

Why is this how it is for so many people? Because it’s too easy to allow habit, rote, routine – and thus the subconscious mind – to do the driving.

How do you take back the wheel? Mindfulness

Mindfulness for control

The only person in your head, heart, and soul is you. Thus, you – and you alone – think, feel, intend, and act for you. Nobody else does and nobody else can.

Still, it’s all too easy to go with the flow, let habit do the work, and not assume the control that’s your right.

This is why all mental, emotional, and spiritual matters are limitless. Because you can and do control these elements of who, what, where, how, and why you are.

By working from your conscious awareness – here and now – you can get and take control of your conscious self and the intentions and actions of all you do. This also puts you in control of your thoughts and feelings – because when you’re actively, presently, consciously aware of them – you can assume control over them and change them as needs be.

Thus, you’re a lot more capable than you allow yourself to recognize.

Odds are, you’re more capable than you know. Give it just a little energy, and I’ll bet you can recall a time that you were more capable and succeeded at something in the past. What did that feel like – and how can you apply it now and do it again?

Mindfulness empowers you to ask, answer, and ultimately do. Because you are capable. More capable, I’d bet, than you consciously recognize.

Can you see that you are ultimately more capable than you realize?

This is the five-hundred and seventy-ninth exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – using mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.

Please take a moment to subscribe to my mailing list. Fill in the info then click the sign-up button to the right and receive your free eBook. Thank you!

The post Are You More Capable Than You Allow Yourself to Recognize? appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

Do You Already Know What’s Best for You and Your Life Experience?

You already know – you just don’t know because it’s too simple to be believable.Photo by Zoe Schaeffer on Unsplash

For over a decade, I’ve been actively exploring how to be the best me that I can be.

One of my greatest strengths is my desire to help others do the same. Why? Because all of us are on this planet together. At the very least we must coexist.

But tolerance isn’t enough. We’re capable of more and better. That’s because everyone has a deep-seated desire for kindness, compassion, and empathy.

No two people in the entire world are alike. That means that we are 8 billion unique, singular individuals. However, all of us have some basic needs – and I don’t mean food, shelter, and companionship.

Everyone desires kindness, compassion, and empathy. Everybody has the desire to be respected for who they are and treated with kindness, compassion, empathy, and dignity.

Unfortunately, because of a lack and scarcity narrative dominating the collective consciousness of society, many feel there’s not enough for everyone. If you give it away it will run out.

It’s true that if you cut down every tree on the planet – and plant no new seeds – wood will run out. But the intangibles – feelings, thoughts, emotions, intentions, kindness, compassion, and empathy can’t run out. They have an infinite supply.

What’s this got to do with the question – do you already know what’s best for you and your life experience? Everything.

Is it really that easy?

If you watch TV or pay any attention at all to advertising, you’re constantly inundated by messages that – unless you have this, but that, or use service “X” – your life is wanting. The lack of this, that, or the other thing makes you less.

They’re nearly always material things. The car, the house, the job, the jewelry, and so on.

But sometimes they’re immaterial. Yet, they’ve been made tangible in various ways. The muscle-to-fat ratio of your body, the friends and lovers you can and can’t get, your sexual performance ability, and the like are all made out to be make-it-or-break-it, best for your life experience things.

Do you need any of those things? Truly? No. I’m not going to deny that having money and some of the trappings of wealth aren’t amazing. They – and more than them, the freedom they allow you – certainly are. But they are not what’s best for you and your life experience.

What is? Finding anything that makes you feel kindness, compassion, and empathy. Having someone let you know they empathize with you, treat you kindly, and work with you compassionately.

That will make you feel as if you belong. And even when you aren’t entirely a part of a given community – that sense of belonging and feeling there is kindness, compassion, and empathy is what’s truly best for you and your life experience.

Why is this what’s best for you and your life experience?

First, because there’s an infinite supply. No lack, no limitation. And it will never run out.

Second – because nobody on the whole planet is truly alone. Even the most reclusive, introverted people are never utterly alone. You always interact with others. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

When you stop and consider what makes you feel calm, centered, and simply okay – it’s not about anything big or important. It’s about feeling like you are where you are, when you are, and why you are. It’s knowing that you’re treated with kindness, compassion, and empathy. Because, when all is said and done, that’s what you need the most.

And it’s not unusual for that to come from yourself, too.

Your harshest critic is likely you. And you are probably the least kind, compassionate, or empathetic toward yourself. I know that’s my problem. I often say less-than-nice things to myself. Unkind, uncompassionate, and unempathetic things I’d never let someone else get away with.

So why do we let ourselves get away with this?

Because you tend to believe the false narratives about the often complicated things that are best for you and your life experience. And so do I.

The narrative is so dominant, in fact, you often don’t even see it for what it is.

What’s more – kindness, compassion, and empathy seem way too simple to be what’s best.

The KISS principle

When it comes to tactics, I was taught long ago to apply the KISS principle. KISS -= Keep It Simple, Stupid.

The word “stupid” isn’t an insult – it’s the notion of the level of simplicity the KISS principle implies. Make it stupid simple. Don’t add complicated elements, over-planned expectations for how the opposition will react, or dependence on anyone or anything outside you.

Why? Because the only thing you can control in the slightest is yourself. There’s not a damned thing you can do about someone else, the weather, or any random happenstance. All you control is you and your actions, reactions, and the like.

Humankind loves to overcomplicate things. Why? Because people think too simple is unworthy. It’s unevolved and how can that be? But when it comes to what’s best for you and your life – why would that change? How would that not remain simple?

Do you NEED the biggest, most expensive car, watch, phone, or whatever? Must you be perfectly proportioned to be acceptable to the world? Are you less without these things? No.

Look inside yourself. Do you desire kindness, compassion, and empathy? I do. I suspect that you do, too.

How is that not too simple? Because when all is said and done, that’s all you really need.

To be fair – there are other, equally simple things that are best for you and your life experience. But kindness, compassion, and empathy are as good a starting point as any.

Do you know anyone who doesn’t desire kindness, compassion, or empathy in their lives?

Finding you already know what’s best for you and your life experience isn’t hard

It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct your actions.

When you pause and look inside yourself, you’ll see that nothing material is truly what’s best for you and your life experience – what’s best is immaterial and intangible. Knowing that the material is not what’s best for anyone – yourself included – you can give more kindness, compassion, empathy, and the like – which in turn opens you to get more as well.

This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you. Then that can expand to change the bigger picture matters, too.

Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts matters in a way to open more dialogue. In that form, you can explore and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.

Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.

Lastly, the better aware you are of yourself in the now, the more you can do to choose and decide how your life experiences will be. When that empowers you, it can also open those around you to their empowerment.

To me, that’s a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share.

Thank you for coming along on this journey.

This is the four hundred-and-sixty-eighth entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.

Please visit here to explore all my published works – both fiction and non-fiction.

Please take a moment to sign up for my newsletter. Fill in the info and click the submit button to the right and receive a free eBook.

The post Do You Already Know What’s Best for You and Your Life Experience? appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

Do You Recognize Your Comfort Zones and How They Impact You?

Everyone has multiple comfort zones that they exist within.Photo by Adolfo Félix on Unsplash

One of the biggest challenges I have when it comes to walking my chosen life path is moving out of my comfort zones.

Even when a given comfort zone is unideal and maybe unhelpful to me and my life, that doesn’t mean leaving it is ever easy. Why? Because comfort zones are comfortable due to their familiarity. And the familiar is often comforting – even when not good for us.

While I’m working on writing novels I’m also doing a multifaceted part-time job that’s a blend of administration, management, public relations, writing, digital, and creative work. I’ve also started a new paid gig writing blogs on specific topics requiring research on my part.

To juggle the demands of both jobs, I’ve had to be more diligent about my time management. This has had the effect of pulling me out of my comfort zone.

The reality is that I need to leave this comfort zone behind.

Why? Because since I work from home exclusively, I’m wholly responsible for how I use my time. There are deadlines to be met that require me to manage my time more effectively than I have been. And that impacts a comfort zone.

A comfort zone. Because there is always more than one depending on what it is and how it impacts you.

How do you recognize your comfort zones?

First – it’s important to understand that comfort zone doesn’t mean being comfortable. A comfort zone is a place of rote, routine, habit, and familiarity that makes it an environment where you feel stable.

Stability zone would be a better phrase. But let’s not confuse matters.

If you have worked in the same cubicle in the same office for a decade, it’s a familiar and stable space. When I worked in cubicles I tended to decorate and “nest” for an added sense of familiarity and comfort.

Thing is, it might be completely stable – but what if you hate your job? What if even though it’s a familiar place and experience – you’re not comfortable with it?

This is the paradox of comfort zones. Often it’s the stability therein that causes us to hold to them – even when they’re not actually comfortable.

This is why people stay in relationships that are bad for them. Being familiar and stable equals a comfort zone.

Hence, many comfort zones are taken for granted. Likewise, when they’re more about stability than comfort, they can be deceitful.

They’re by no means always places. Comfort zones can apply to people and self-care, too.

For example – I’ve been wearing my hair shaved close to the scalp for about 25 years. Recently, I decided to let it go. Would it fro like it used to? What’s it like now that it’s salt and pepper? And the biggest question – since this takes me out of the familiar “comfort zone” of my close-cropped hair – how long will I let it go?

This might seem silly – but how I’ve maintained my hair for 25 years is a comfort zone. It’s also a great example of how recognizing your comfort zones can be challenging.

How do they impact your life?

This can be distressing. Why? Because many so-called comfort zones aren’t comfortable at all. They’re simply familiar.

Jobs we stick with that aren’t good for our health, relationships that are bad for our wellbeing, and things we do to not inconvenience others but inconvenience and upset us are all examples of the familiar that become comfort zones.

Until you identify and recognize your comfort zones, you can’t know how they’ll impact you.

A great deal of the sense of being stuck, incomplete, and like something is missing is often tied to a comfort zone. Again, a stable, familiar zone.

Why does this matter? Because if you need and want to change almost anything in your life, it will require leaving a comfort zone. And leaving your comfort zone always require action and intent.

To move out of a comfort zone require conscious awareness – here and now. And that’s why you must recognize your comfort zones – so that you know what and where they are. Then you can better move out of them.

Photo by Simona Marinkova on UnsplashMindfulness for leaving comfort zones

Any intentional, willful act of change begins with conscious awareness of what it is you desire to change.

To do so requires mindfulness.

Mindfulness in this context is conscious awareness here and now. Specifically, conscious awareness of your mindset/headspace/psyche self via present knowledge of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. This knowing, in the present moment, doesn’t just inform you of what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, what you intend, and what actions you are, aren’t, can, or can’t take. It also empowers you to control and change them.

Change is the only constant in the Universe. Often, it’s utterly and completely outside of your control. But not always. When it comes to you and your life – given you’re the only one in your head, heart, body, and soul – changing yourself is what you can and do control.

Choosing to make any sort of change is very likely to impact comfort zones. And while the intent is to go somewhere better than where you are – resistance to leaving the familiar of your comfort zone will make it more challenging.

What is this resistance and where does it come from?

The ego

The ego, as I conceptualize it, is a bridge between your conscious self and subconscious self. It was created at a time when you were consciously working in your subconscious and aware of your beliefs, values, and habits therein at that time.

The ego is then both how you project yourself to the world at large and reflect yourself back to yourself. Often, the ego is – if not whispering in the ear of your subconscious when it’s driving by habit, rote, and routine – doing the driving.

Because most people don’t regularly practice mindfulness via conscious awareness in the present – the ego is how they identify. It’s who you have been, as far as you know, for a given period.

The ego loves stability. It seeks it. Even uncomfortable stability in undesirable places. Ergo – the ego wants to stay in given comfort zones.

This is why the ego will hold you to comfort zones you desire to leave. Recognizing this, however, opens the way for you to make new choices and fight any resistance you meet as you move forward.

Remember – you’re worthy and deserving of living the life you desire. While leaving comfort zones can be massively uncomfortable – it can also be utterly worth it.

Everyone has multiple comfort zones that they exist within.

Do you know your comfort zones and how they might be impacting you?

This is the five-hundred and seventy-eighth exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – using mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.

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The post Do You Recognize Your Comfort Zones and How They Impact You? appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

How Are the Little Positive Things Actually So Big?

Because all the little positive things add up and are more frequent than the big things.Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash

The little things are often taken for granted.

One of the few downsides to moving where we live now was being far from one of our favorite restaurants. It’s an amazing Thai place we used to go to at least once a month that also offered delicious dim sum on the weekends.

Following one of the craziest months for either of us, my wife decided we needed to go out for dim sum. I did a little Google searching and found a place. It was only 10 minutes or so from home, so we went for it.

As soon as we walked in, we were convinced we chose well. The tea was perfect, the dim sum was fantastic, and we had an amazing brunch.

In the same shopping plaza, there’s a large Asian market. We decided we needed to check it out. And wow, It’s amazing.

This was maybe two hours out of our Sunday morning. And in the grand scheme of things – little positive things, really.

No big deal, right?

Actually, this was a big deal. We did something little that made us both happy and content and started the week off on a good foot.

These little positive things are the easiest positives to find. And rather than take them for granted – recognizing them empowers them to be much bigger.

Positivity appreciates

It’s all too easy to get focused on looking for, finding, and/or creating big positive things. Buying big-ticket items like homes and cars, starting new relationships, beginning new jobs, and the like often get all the attention as worthwhile positives.

But they are once-in-a-while, sometimes even once-in-a-lifetime events. Are those the only positives worth giving our time and attention to?

These are not, by any stretch of the imagination, all that life’s about. There are everyday and regular happenings that are little positive things. And these little things all add up.

Positivity, like compound interest and gratitude, appreciates. Like both, giving more gets you more, too.

In a fear-based world full of frequent negativity, false lack and scarcity, and hate-mongering, positivity gets clouded. Then, on top of that, toxic positivity also derails the power of positivity because of its toxic nature.

Genuine, real positivity is unconditional, well-intentioned, and unselfish. It also tends to be in smaller terms that are easy to take for granted or otherwise ignored for all they can do for you.

Examples of little positive things

Before continuing, I’d like to share some little positive things.

Also note – these can be tangible, intangible, and/or both.

Little positive things can include but are by no means limited to:

Sunlight on your faceThe first cup of tea or coffee in the morningThe purr of a cat or wagging of a dog’s taleBeing thankedEating a tasty biteHugging and/or kissing someone you loveA favorite song playing on the radioSome happy memory popping up in your headLaughingSinging

Some of these might look small and insignificant. Perhaps they are. But all these little positive things, added together, make for bigger positive things. And that can, when you focus on them, change your experience for the better.

Photo by Elizabeth Tsung on UnsplashWhy do these things matter?

You and I get one shot in these bodies. That means that we each get just one experience to live life, learn, grow, do, have, and be.

Human beings are unique to the animal kingdom in that we are capable of way, way more than mere survival. Look at where you live, the technology you have, and what you do with your life. If you’re reading this, I’m fairly sure you’re not merely surviving.

Every single person on the planet is capable of amazing things. We all have potential and possibilities. Admittedly, some have it easier than others, privilege and environment each play a part. Even so, look at people who did great things but started from nothing and people who started with everything but made nothing of their lives or fell apart.

Whatever your experience, you are worthy and deserving of good things. Contentment, happiness, and positives. That’s why the little positive things are, frankly, more important than the big positive things. That’s because the big things are infrequent and fleeting. The little things, conversely, are far more regular and recurrent.

Just look at the list above. Sunlight on your face might not be a daily thing – but it’s still a regular thing. You can buy or make that tasty bite, make or purchase tea or coffee, hug someone, and so on. All the little positive things I shared above are easily found and/or made. They are not infrequent and are easy to access.

It is the ease of access and simplicity of these little positive things that turns them into big things. The appreciation of positivity positively impacts you. That reinforces you to balance, center, and cope with an all-too-often fearful world.

That’s why little positive things are so big when all is said and done.

Finding and/or creating little positive things isn’t hard

It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct your actions.

When you can see that little positive things are abundant, frequent, and recurrent – and compound like interest and gratitude – you can make greater use of them to combat the fear and negativity of society. Or more specifically – your place within it. Knowing that there are almost unlimited amounts of little positive things that might already be a part of your life (but are taken for granted) you can recognize, acknowledge, and seek them out for the good they do you.

This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you. Then that can expand to change the bigger picture matters, too.

Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts matters in a way to open more dialogue. In that form, you can explore and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.

Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.

Lastly, the better aware you are of yourself in the now, the more you can do to choose and decide how your life experiences will be. When that empowers you, it can also open those around you to their empowerment.

To me, that’s a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share.

Thank you for coming along on this journey.

This is the four hundred-and-sixty-seventh entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.

Please visit here to explore all my published works – both fiction and non-fiction.

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The post How Are the Little Positive Things Actually So Big? appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.