Why do we do what we do in this world? Do we do things to make other people happy, do we do things to make ourselves happy, or is it a combination of both? I believe that we need a combination of both, a balance. You go too far one way, (making other people happy), and you end up losing your true self, becoming needy, always relying on others to make you happy… you go too far the other way and you’re a Narcissist, (the Me! Me! Me! show, which is kind of needy in itself). Both sides, because there isn’t a balance, rely on others to tell them how special they are. So what would a good balance look like then?

Here is an example of having a balance of the two;

Recently we went on vacation with some close friends to do some wine tasting in California. One of the evenings we started discussing all of the ‘no no’s’… Politics and Religion. Why do I consider these people close friends? Because we each had our own opinions about the political climate as well as religion, traditions, faith, etc. We were having a discussion, a debate. We all learned something that night about each other and why each one of us felt the way we did about each subject…. and we’re still friends! Yes, we are still friends because we each respected the others opinions. I’ll tell you something that we all learned as well…

We believe what we believe because of the conditions we’ve lived in. Because of our experiences. And not one of us have experienced the same thing. So why would we expect to have the same views? Diversity. Diversity leads to growth. Growth leads to change. And change is the only constant in this universe. Change can be good if we let it be.

I’ve often shared with people my philosophy… I don’t believe in right or wrong. I believe in what works or what doesn’t work. When we take on the philosophy of ‘what works’ or ‘what doesn’t work’ we say that no one person is right or wrong, because everybody has their own opinion. Opinions can be so varied from person to person. As I stated above… not one of us were raised the same, nor with the same beliefs or ideas. So when I see people rallying behind one candidate or another (I’m using the political candidates as a reference because of the climate right now. I’ve seen friends ‘de-friend’ others because they believe something different from themselves or because they’ve been attacked for having an opposing belief.) I don’t say that those people are ‘wrong’ or ‘right’. I look at each unique situation and see why each group would rally behind one or the other candidate. Now, do I agree with them? No, but that is my journey, not theirs.

If we had a balance within ourselves we wouldn’t be concerned one iota about what somebody else believes or not. There is a reason why we have the candidates that we have today. They are who we are. They are only mimicking what we all believe or have been brainwashed to believe. Yes, I said brainwashed. We’ve lost original thought. We are so caught up in our Facebook or Twitter feeds that we can’t think for ourselves anymore and all of this has become a popularity contest. Numerous times I’ve seen people re-post Dogma that they’ve been sent without doing their own research. There is a truth in the saying…

“Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.” – Benjamin Franklin

So I guess what I’m asking you is this… “What do you believe?” Are you afraid to say what you really believe because of what people might say to you? Talk to me… you know that I will be the guy that talks politics and religion. Why? Because whatever you might share with me, I might learn something… or vise versa.

So what are you afraid of? Are you afraid of losing friends? My question to you would be… are those friends worth having in your life? If you can’t have people around you that are helping you grow as a human being then they aren’t worth having.

Peace out!
D

 “Hell happens when the evil of the world exceeds our belief
that we can conquer it.” – Divinci’s Demons

This might be the first time that I’ve taken a quote from a TV series, but it had such an impact on me when I heard it, I had to write it down.

I’m sure you know somebody that says, “I’m in Hell”. Are they saying it for sympathy or recognition or have they truly fallen so low that they can’t see any possible way to get out of their situation? When it is the latter, what can we do about it?

There will always be what people perceive as good and evil or hell in this world. It’s all just that, a perception. This is why I am such a huge proponent of The Law of Attraction. I will get to that momentarily, but first, before jumping directly into the fire (no pun intended), a little background on how I got to this point.

I’ve felt a time or two that there was no way in the world that I could ever change my life, that I was doomed to this existence. So I can speak from experience. It wasn’t until I started to retrain my brain to think differently, did this change.

It’s hard for people to hear that nothing is impossible
if they think that everything is indeed, impossible.

To those people they are just words, quotes out of Chicken Soup for the Soul or some other self help book. To hear those words and have them mean something in your life, you, at first, need to take baby steps. You need to reach out to someone who truly does believe these words. Someone who can help you, guide you to your feet. Eventually little things will start happening around you that prove to you that, in fact, nothing is impossible. It will take belief. And part of the reason it took me so long is because I needed physical proof.

I’ve never been much of a believer
mainly because I never had belief in myself.

It’s the mirror that I’ve talked about in other blogs. We can’t see what we are not, inside. So it’s going to take reshaping ourselves inside for the outside to change. It took me going back to my childhood where I would sit in my room for hours alone building cities with my lego blocks. Racing my matchbox cars around the city. Making believe that anything that came to my head was possible. It took retracing my steps backwards to where it all began. It started when my father left us. I was only Seven. I had become a grown up at Seven, the man of the house. How overwhelming is that? It took me forgiving my father for what he had done to us (or what I perceived as him doing to us), and accepting that his reality is much different than mine.

He didn’t do this to me personally, I did this to myself.

It took all of this for me to start retraining my brain to know that I do matter. That I am, in fact, the person that I am today because of it. I needed to believe again.

Some people run to religion, some run to drugs or alcohol or sex. In moderation, any of these can be fun or helpful tools for us. (I’ve always wanted to take a trip on ayahuasca). But each one of these things become crutches, band-aids to the real problem, until you can actually believe in yourself. Again, they are all TEMPORARY until you believe in yourself. Baby steps, Baby!

So how do we do this? Where do we start?

Like I mentioned above… get someone who can help you, guide you. If you don’t have the means to get a coach, get a friend that you can lean on for a bit. Someone you can trust with all of your deep dark secrets. You need to go back to the root of the problem. Figure out where it all started by peeling back the layers of the onion.

There might be a lot of layers to peel back but if you don’t start now
there will be even more layers to peel back in the future.

For me it was delving into Summit Education when I lived in Florida. It was kind of like a Tony Robbins program. It had three phases. Basic, Advanced and the the Leadership course where I would have coaching calls every morning before I started my day. I equate it to Marine Corp Bootcamp, only for your soul. It took months of retraining to get the neural pathways to start new, healthier patterns. Kind of like grooves on a record. I dug so deep that I eventually became a coach.

You can go to a Tony Robbin’s seminar or some other self help seminar for a weekend and it will have an impact, but for 99% of you it will be very short lived. It won’t really stop the patterns. It will only put a band-aid on them. You need to really dig in and make yourself uncomfortable.

Facing your fears, your mistakes, and traumas
will scare the shit out of you.

But when you finally reach that layer of the onion that has kept you where you are today you will smile and you will gladly start going deeper down the rabbit hole.

For me, that rabbit hole led me to The Law of Attraction. It started with a movie called The Secret which was a great introduction into the Law of Attraction. I hold these believes dear to me because after traveling down this spiritual highway it rang true to my soul. It was so simple that it was funny. You see, the basics of the Law of Attraction are this…

What you focus on becomes your reality.

Silly right? I mean, what if we could start our lives out believing this?

Let’s break this down… What we focus on becomes our reality. Imagine this… You’re driving down the highway heading towards where you want to go, you’ve got your GPS dialed in and all of a sudden you see something on the side of the road and you just can’t get your eyes off of it, then your car crashes. You get out and say to yourself, “How did this happen? How did I end up here?” It happened because your focus was on something else. It wasn’t a temporary glance.

Life is this way for most of us. We get down in the dumps and we crash. We can’t take our focus off of what brought us to that point, instead of temporarily looking at it, recognizing it for what it is, and then focusing back our attention on our destination. This happens because we start believing it. We start believing it because we don’t have the tools to recognize it for what it is, a temporary distraction.

Now this is a very basic introduction to this only for the sake of time and space for this blog, but I encourage you to delve deep down into that rabbit hole. Start peeling back the layers of the onion and soon the evil of this world that everyone perceives, will only be a temporary distraction to where your destination lies.

And remember this…

It’s called a Spiritual Practice for a reason.
It must become a practice, every day, or it will fade away.

Peace,
David

This article can be read on Sin City Presents or the link below.

http://joom.ag/HZJQ/p44

I don’t watch the news… I haven’t for years. I know that news will travel to me via word of mouth. It always does. I listen to both sides of whatever the story is that travels to me and then base my own interpretation on what that story may be. The only saying is the truth… There’s your side of the story, my side of the story and then there is the truth. In my last blog I wrote about ‘truth’ and that ‘truth’ is a very individual interpretation. I don’t believe that we ever get anywhere when we say that something is ‘wrong’. We can only come to a conclusion when we acknowledge that something doesn’t work for everybody. Please feel free to read that blog if you want a deeper understanding. You can find it here. My only reason for even bringing this up is because of all of the news that has traveled to me about what happened in Dallas.

What I am not going to do here is get into what has already been said by the media. There are plenty of people that will give their opinions. What I will do is give my opinion on why I think it happened.

I can’t speak about being oppressed, or being a minority. I can’t speak of constantly looking over my shoulder ready to be blamed for something. I am a WASP. A white anglo-saxon Protestant. At least I was born that way. When they say that the world is your oyster… quite literally it is for me here in America. I don’t have money, fame or any of the things that I strive for… but I do have the potential to have all of that with no obstacles in my way except for what obstacles I create myself. It’s because I’m white. Now my Black, Hispanic and Native American brothers don’t have the freedom that I do. They are always getting looked at as a potential threat. I can never know how they truly feel, so I won’t even speculate, nor judge.

If we look back in history we had Martin Luther King, a peaceful protester and leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Despite all of the obstacles in his way he knew that Hate vs. Hate will only breed more Hate. The only way to balance it was with Love. Martin Luther King was killed for what he believed in. A very powerful man who influences me, this white man, to this very day. On the other side were the Black Panthers. The side that believed that they could only bring peace through other methods. Who was ‘right’ and who was ‘wrong’? Again, as I’ve stated, I don’t believe in ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but what works and what doesn’t work. People do what they do because that is what ‘works’ for them at the time. That struggle is still going on today. I have white friends who will tell me that the black people should just get over it already. My blatant reply to them? Fuck You. Until you can walk in their shoes shut your fucking mouth.

So what do I believe? I believe that it’s all F.E.A.R.: False Evidence Appearing Real.

A percentage of people out there still don’t want equal rights. Hell, there is still a KKK out there. Baffles my mind really. But I know that it is out of F.E.A.R.. These people are afraid. Afraid of what? I don’t know… I’ve never talked to one. But I have talked to several people who are afraid. It’s inbred I believe. We learn our F.E.A.R.. We aren’t born with it, it is passed down from generation to generation. The only way to break the mold is to live our lives the way that we want to without letting F.E.A.R. stop us. If your parents are prejudice it is more than likely that you will be as well unless you step away… assess your own feelings and move forward.

A number of years back, when I lived in Colorado, I wrote a song with some friends in England. I called the song F.E.A.R.. Listen to it and read the words. F.E.A.R. is an individual response and the only way to conquer it is through love and doing what you were mean’t to do on this planet. I don’t believe that there is any other way… at least not in my reality.

Peace,
David Reed Watson

What’s the confusion? What’s the solution?
What’s the conclusion to a life un-lived?
Who do you turn to when your world becomes un-glued?
Follow your passion and align your dreams

Aggravation to adulation
You get what you ask for (Sometimes in extremes)

It’s just F.E.A.R. that keeps you here
You control your situation
Meditate, don’t hesitate
Clarity will wipe that F.E.A.R. away

Constant attention, and forward momentum
Keeps the addiction from coming to light
Look at your feelings, they are there for a reason
Give yourself meaning to a meaningless life

Aggravation to adulation
You get what you ask for in this world of dreams

It’s just F.E.A.R. that keeps you here
You control your situation
Meditate, don’t hesitate
Clarity will wipe that F.E.A.R. away

Meditation is my medication

I don’t watch the news… I haven’t for years. I know that news will travel to me via word of mouth. It always does. I listen to both sides of whatever the story is that travels to me and then base my own interpretation on what that story may be. The only saying is the truth… There’s your side of the story, my side of the story and then there is the truth. In my last blog I wrote about ‘truth’ and that ‘truth’ is a very individual interpretation. I don’t believe that we ever get anywhere when we say that something is ‘wrong’. We can only come to a conclusion when we acknowledge that something doesn’t work for everybody. Please feel free to read that blog if you want a deeper understanding. You can find it here. My only reason for even bringing this up is because of all of the news that has traveled to me about what happened in Dallas.

What I am not going to do here is get into what has already been said by the media. There are plenty of people that will give their opinions. What I will do is give my opinion on why I think it happened.

I can’t speak about being oppressed, or being a minority. I can’t speak of constantly looking over my shoulder ready to be blamed for something. I am a WASP. A white anglo-saxon Protestant. At least I was born that way. When they say that the world is your oyster… quite literally it is for me here in America. I don’t have money, fame or any of the things that I strive for… but I do have the potential to have all of that with no obstacles in my way except for what obstacles I create myself. It’s because I’m white. Now my Black, Hispanic and Native American brothers don’t have the freedom that I do. They are always getting looked at as a potential threat. I can never know how they truly feel, so I won’t even speculate, nor judge.

If we look back in history we had Martin Luther King, a peaceful protester and leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Despite all of the obstacles in his way he knew that Hate vs. Hate will only breed more Hate. The only way to balance it was with Love. Martin Luther King was killed for what he believed in. A very powerful man who influences me, this white man, to this very day. On the other side were the Black Panthers. The side that believed that they could only bring peace through other methods. Who was ‘right’ and who was ‘wrong’? Again, as I’ve stated, I don’t believe in ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but what works and what doesn’t work. People do what they do because that is what ‘works’ for them at the time. That struggle is still going on today. I have white friends who will tell me that the black people should just get over it already. My blatant reply to them? Fuck You. Until you can walk in their shoes shut your fucking mouth.

So what do I believe? I believe that it’s all F.E.A.R.: False Evidence Appearing Real.

A percentage of people out there still don’t want equal rights. Hell, there is still a KKK out there. Baffles my mind really. But I know that it is out of F.E.A.R.. These people are afraid. Afraid of what? I don’t know… I’ve never talked to one. But I have talked to several people who are afraid. It’s inbred I believe. We learn our F.E.A.R.. We aren’t born with it, it is passed down from generation to generation. The only way to break the mold is to live our lives the way that we want to without letting F.E.A.R. stop us. If your parents are prejudice it is more than likely that you will be as well unless you step away… assess your own feelings and move forward.

A number of years back, when I lived in Colorado, I wrote a song with some friends in England. I called the song F.E.A.R.. Listen to it and read the words. F.E.A.R. is an individual response and the only way to conquer it is through love and doing what you were mean’t to do on this planet. I don’t believe that there is any other way… at least not in my reality.

Peace,
David Reed Watson

What’s the confusion? What’s the solution?
What’s the conclusion to a life un-lived?
Who do you turn to when your world becomes un-glued?
Follow your passion and align your dreams

Aggravation to adulation
You get what you ask for (Sometimes in extremes)

It’s just F.E.A.R. that keeps you here
You control your situation
Meditate, don’t hesitate
Clarity will wipe that F.E.A.R. away

Constant attention, and forward momentum
Keeps the addiction from coming to light
Look at your feelings, they are there for a reason
Give yourself meaning to a meaningless life

Aggravation to adulation
You get what you ask for in this world of dreams

It’s just F.E.A.R. that keeps you here
You control your situation
Meditate, don’t hesitate
Clarity will wipe that F.E.A.R. away

Meditation is my medication