Your Morning Thought

Leave it in 2017 Okay, this is kind of a big one for me.  I had a lot of bad habits.  Habits that were put into me by my upbringing, by society, by lack of knowledge, by ignorance, etc. I remember being a teen, my dad was a smoker, smoked around us all of the time and didn't see an issue with it.  If we were being raised by him in today's society, they would hang him.  So naturally, I picked up the habit around age 14 or 15.  Definitely 9th grade.  Sneaking off to smoke cigarettes, smoke before and after school...ya know...typical teenage stuff.  Well, that followed me into my adulthood and eventually started causing some negative health effects.  Just hacking every morning and all of the lovely stuff that comes with poisoning our lungs for "fun" on a daily basis.  I had always wanted to quit but could never quite get there. I was reading reddit one day and I came across an article about e-cigarettes.  Everyone in the comments was going on and on about how they save

Death Of Your Ego Elliott Hulse - Die Before You Die The Way of the Samurai So this is all very interesting...and I would like to just sometimes...go back and clobber myself because what I know now has been taught a million times over...BUT...alas...it has still brought me here and not a lot of people get here...so...Great. The death of my ego.  Dropping everything that I held in value in order to become who I am today.  Previous to this I drank to get drunk everyday of my life.  Everyday...now what this does is it calms the voice, it subdues the passions...it makes you "okay" with things that are not okay.  You can ignore the tapping, so to speak. 2 or so years prior to the complete breakdown of myself, I was going on a journey to better my body.  I focused on it heavily, it brought me great joy.  I was also working 2 jobs, keeping up on and improving my guitar/singing skills.  Slightly prior to the better body journey, I was still drinking heavily...I would wake u

It Is All Good In my life, I have gone through struggle. I had the fortune of being my mother's second child and my father's first born son....and also being the middle child.  I remember the fight to try and stay relevant..all while being held to a higher standard than my older brother.  There was always something a little different about me, I always kind of tried to make things better and I always spent a lot of time by myself...figuring things out.  I remember, I could not have been more that 6 or 7 years old.  It was Halloween and we lived outside of a bad neighborhood that my parent's warned us to never go near, no matter what.  My older brother did not heed their advice and wound up getting "jumped"...losing his Halloween candy.  In my innocence, I offered up all of my candy to him...and in his true nature, instead of being thankful for the gesture alone...he took it all....lol In my effort to stay relevant, I tried to succeed where my older brother fai

This is an interesting thought/experience for today.  I forgot to do my morning thought as I am coming off vacation and out of practice.  Christmas was the best I have had in a long time.  Filled with the joy and wonder that this time of year brings. Onto the subject at hand.  I was at my mother's for the holiday, we had just eaten and I wasn't feeling well.  I was tired because we I had very little sleep due to celebration and getting up to volunteer at the nursing home to help my mom.  I went up to rest in my brother's old room which has become mine.  I felt very ill and visions of me being sick all week were starting to manifest themselves.  This would have been bad because I am out of paid time off due to it being the end of the year.  As I was lying there wondering what my fate shall be I fell into somewhat of a dream state...and awoke to a feeling of floating...which is always scary so I went to ground myself and the voice said to me "How are we supposed to fix y

TOOLS  KSEE Knowledge Strategy Execution Evaluation To expand on this.  I was having a discussion with a person whom I have never met that comes through my Facebook feed.  It stated loosely around "It is better to make a mistake than to not do anything."  This is true, to a point.  If we continue to go out and make mistakes and not take from them, it is kind of like pounding your head against a wall and expecting change.  Also, there have been a lot of people that have come into the world before we have...that have made a lot of mistakes.  While I will agree that experience is a great teacher, there are people that have spent their whole lives experiencing things.  Also, the great thing about humans that sets us apart from any other animal is that we can project.  We can take in information and determine an outcome....many outcomes....so thought is a powerful too. I was also thinking today about tools...and I am about to enter a discussion with a professional men's

Make A Decision "To make a decision means to cut yourself off from any other possibility."  loosely quoted - Les Brown  "I'll do it or I'll die." Oh boy....I have had to come to a lot of realizations in my life.  I know when I am able to focus all of my strength on one point, I have power.  I am not sure when I got away from this, well, I can pinpoint certain events that brought me to the point of obesity in my 20s.  I got caught up in...well...having a good time.  Doing what felt good instead of what is good.  Now, I didn't go around hurting people on purpose...but I have done some really stupid things that could have resulted in a lot of trouble.  It is by the grace of God that I type these words and to him that I am whole heartedly sorry.  He gave me this beautiful life and I was wasting it. Several times in the recent past I have been able to really put myself in a position of making a true decision.  "I'll do it no matter what."...an

Seek The Truth As we go through life we are bombarded with things that try to catch our attention.  Things that give us hope, things that we put our faith into, things that sell us on the fact that we are lacking. Feeling bad?  Try this drug, fragrance, food, diet, etc.  Feeling happy?  Enhance your mood with this product or that product.  Point is, when you are operating from a position of lack, you will open yourself up to things that will never fill you.  You will always need more...and more...and more. This is where goal setting, a belief system, faith, etc are important.  If you have a goal in life, in my case during my weight loss journey...I could pose the question "Is this action going to get me closer to my goal?"  If the answer was no, I didn't do it.  So therefore you have rooted yourself in your truth in your purpose.  This is good, it is good practice. The only issue is, eventually you will obtain your goal...keep steadfast to that idea and I guarantee you

Find Your Faith This has been the hardest lesson of my life. Backstory. In 1999, I believe, I was confirmed into the Catholic church and even though I accepted the Lord as our savior, the one true God, maker of heaven and earth, all this is seen and unseen....I didn't really believe it.  Due to some circumstances in my life, being a dumb teenager, parents divorcing...lack of direction and any myriad of things a young man goes through when trying to figure out life.  I promptly left the church, never to return...or so I thought at that time. Looking back now, I can see what I was doing.  I was so lost I was clinging to anything and when I felt empty, I would lash out, blame a person in the flesh for my shortcomings and remove them from my life...repeat and repeat ad nauseum.  I engaged in sin...a lot of it.  I entered into a marriage that was performed outside of the church.  I broke every single commandment in more ways than one can imagine.  I was well off the beaten path.  I n

Your Morning Thought As we go through life in pursuit of our goals, well, life happens.  In my life I was pursuing my dream of opening my own brew pub, I had been in the restaurant/bar industry for 12 or 13 years at this point.  Some things happened that lead me in that direction.  I was driven with purpose, creating my business plan, I got my LLC, had a place picked out, people lined up.  Well, life happened.  Divorce happened, my father had a massive stroke and I was his next of kin.  I wound up having some mental health issues in part from trauma and along with a beta blocker I had been put on for blood pressure and anxiety.  Long story short, that dream and drive left me.  It was no longer mine, I had failed the test.  Could I pick it back up?  Perhaps.  But I am in firm belief that, that is no longer my true purpose.  That layer of my existence taught me the lesson I needed and it is time to move on. I read...I read a lot and I take notes.  My latest read and it is making A LO

"We are born helpless, how far we go beyond that point is up to us." I want to expand on the thought of your comfort zone.  I believe our ability to grow and change as a person has unlimited potential if we can tap into it.  Our ability to adapt is what has brought us to this point as human beings.  That being said, there are a lot of things we are battling in our heads that come from keeping us safe so that we were able to move on as a species.  One of these things is our "fight-or-flight" response.  You can see this in animals, in this area in particular, deer. As you see deer in the wild, when they are spooked they run, but some freeze in place.  Those that freeze usually end up in our freezers.  So think about this as you go through life, what areas are you frozen in and what areas are you running from?  Perhaps it is time to fight.  The question is "How do we get passed the flight or frozen point?"  We have to change our comfort zone. First step