Your Morning Thought

What if we had to come back and live the life of everyone we came into contact with? I bet we would treat each other a little better. A lot of times we don’t realize the effect we have on other people. From mental and physical abuse…to a kind word or a hand on a shoulder when someone is hurting. Personally I have been in a couple situations where gaslighting was in play. It is a horrid form of mental abuse that a lot of times the abusers don’t even know they are doing it. “Stop overreacting.” “Oh, don’t be so dramatic.” When you know something is not right, they will push the blame onto you or make you feel like your perception is not true. “I would never do that!” “Why can’t you just trust me?” “Do I constantly need to prove myself?” “You are being insecure.” These are all tools of a mentally manipulative person. The effects of years of gaslighting will leave a person unable to trust their own judgement. They will constantly look towards others for guidance b

Take Massive Action Getting out of your comfort zone is a good practice, but it is very hard to do these days.  Everywhere we go we are bombarded with comfort.  Food?  Have it in an instant.  Need to rest?  Hotels and motels dot the highways.  Spas, bars, massage parlors, and gentleman's clubs.  Whatever we need to "relax" is right at our fingertips.  Sounds great, doesn't it? For me, not really. For too long I sat in comfort as many of us do.  I ballooned up to 242 lbs, which by today's standards, really isn't that bad, which is kind of a shame really.  But it was too big for me.  So, I took massive action.  I needed to.  I needed to shake things up. Anyone can do this in their life if they need to.  If you are stuck in a rut, the most perfect thing you can do is take massive action.  DO SOMETHING. Pick up the phone, make the call.  Go visit that friend you need to make amends with.  Chances are, they either don't care or it is bugging them just

An Attitude Of Gratitude It gets hard in life to see the positive in things.  We live in such a negative world.  All over the TV, the news, the Internet we see and hear messages telling us that we are not enough, that the world is in chaos, that their is suffering everywhere.  This could not be further from the truth.  We are closer now than we have ever been to a major breakthrough in our society. I have had this discussion many times, but humanity is actually doing one heck of a job at being good.  We are now approaching 8 billion people on the planet and for the most part, we get along just fine despite what the TV tells you. When people ask me what I think of what is going on I tell them, it is just not true.  Sure, there are some horrible things happening, but for the majority of people, we are living out our lives just fine.  If you would like some proof, go down the street and talk to your neighbor.  Everybody wants the same thing in life whether we know it yet or not.  We

Watch For Red Flags I think back on life and in certain situations where if I had just known or trusted my gut, things might have been different.  Don't get me wrong, I love my life and I wouldn't trade it simply because everything that I have gone through has made me who I am today.  I like that person, BUT. Now that I am on the other side or what I at least perceive is the other side of anxiety and depression I can look back and see all of the red flags that were missed.  They are glaring now. From completely cowering as a "man" to hold onto something that I thought I wanted. Don't do that.  Stand up for yourself. It was a long process to get to where I am today, along the way I stumbled upon self development books.  A friend gave me "This is How" - Augusten Burroughs  It was a delightful book that teaches us that we can change the we think and completely change how happy we are. Heavily I went into self development.  I stumbled a lot, it ha

Don't Ask Too Many Questions I sort of misspoke in my post this morning.  If you are talking to a miserable person and you say: "Good morning, beautiful day, isn't it?" You are most likely going to get some sort of negative response. "What is so beautiful about it?" Then you will engage in a conversation where they tell you how miserable everything is and how their life is terrible and on and on and on until you are a puddle on the ground. But, at least you would know what type of person you are dealing with.  We all know them, we all have them in our lives.  Those that can't seem to get anything together, they are always miserable, and nothing you can say or do can change that.  Simple solution, don't engage them. If you can, avoid them.  If you can't, avoid asking questions.  Use closed statements. "It is a great day." "I hope you have a wonderful evening." "It is good to see you!" All of these allow

Just stick with it, it takes awhile. If you are depressed, you didn't get there overnight and you won't be getting out of there overnight. For years I wasted my life.  I did what felt good, always seeking outside sources of pleasure.  Booze, pornography, sex, more booze, bad food, whatever I could get my hands on to escape my own existence because I HATED what I had become. There were times when I had some thoughts about myself and my life.  "What are you doing?  Is this really it?  Is this all you are capable of?" I was raised to do slightly better and that's all I was really doing.  I had the job, the girl that everyone wanted, I had plenty of money or at least what I thought was plenty.  Don't get me wrong, I was doing some amazing things, BUT, my mind was being twisted. It's a rough road to come out of.  It means forgetting everything you know.  When I found out we are actually supposed to live our lives, I was angry. "Why didn'

Go and get it. If it means going through hell 1,000 times...do it...because one of these times it is going to be worth it. That's what keeps me in the game. At anytime you can give up...go back to the locker room...call it quits. You have that option. But on your deathbed...looking around at what you have done with your life...do you want to say "I did it" or "Wait! One more shot!" ? I don't care if you are 75 years old...you still have life in you...you still are here for a reason. When I get down on life...I call my sweet 88 year old grandmother...you know what she says after almost a century of being on this rock? "Still here, thank God" Damn right...still here... I saw my father give up.  I saw the life taken out of him.  There was a time when I was giving him hundreds of dollars to support himself.  He stayed with me for awhile in my mid 20s.  I was DJing at the time and I would get paid in hundred dollar bills if

Disclaimer...I wrote this on March 30, 2016 To Your Health Today I want to talk a little bit about your vehicle. Not that man made vehicle sitting in your driveway with a 500 mile past due oil change and a cracked windshield. Because that is not your vehicle, that's mine. lol No, no...I am talking about your life vehicle. Your body. Your body is the only thing you have to get you through this adventure we call life. Now I don't know about you, but I have gotten myself is some poor situations because I did not take care of my car before a big trip. There were things I knew I needed to do, but I ignored them. Those tires will make it another 3,000 miles....even though my mechanic said “Hey, your tires are just about worn through!”  Bah, what does he know?  Many of us do this to our bodies. We won’t even listen to our mechanic, our doctor. “Sir/Ma’am you need to lose weight.” “Bah, what does he know?” Oh I don’t know, it’s only his job. Then again

It’s not just a cliche saying, it is the truth. We can hope, pray, want, believe, ask, beg, anything you can think of, but eventually, you are just going to have to do it. We can fill our heads with all of the knowledge in the world, but if we don’t apply the knowledge it is useless. For a long time in my life, I knew things. I knew exactly what I needed to do and exactly how to do it, but failed to act. Think about how many times in your life that an opportunity was placed in front of you and if you would have just taken the chance, perhaps your whole life would be completely changed. That girl you wanted to ask out, she would be your wife right now. That job you saw posted in the paper, that would have been you career. That diet that you read all about, you would have lost the weight. A failure to act is a huge problem is today’s society. Many of us, myself included at one time, just take what is handed to us, no matter how bad it is. For a long tim

Feel Everything and Live In today's "feel good" society it seems we are really losing base with the reason for struggle.  We are taught that life is supposed to be easy and that pain is bad.  Not all pain is bad, there is a reason for it. Throughout my life I have tried to avoid pain, even though it was ever present.  I have a history of injuries, no broken bones, no surgeries, but cuts, bruises, and burns.  Emotional pain of losing people that were close to me.  The girl I took to prom died in an automobile accident, my brother John died after being struck by a vehicle, my father and grandfather passed away within a few months of each other. What I used to do was avoid it.  I avoided the pain as much as I could.  I didn't go to the teenage funeral, I held onto that pain for a long time.  I would carry her picture in my wallet well into my adulthood.  I finally made my peace with it a few years ago by finding her grave, leaving a gift, and that picture as well.

You must believe in order to achieve.  Everything we have on this planet made by man began with a thought.  Ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Granted, some people had a head start.  Think of it like the old NES and having a cheat code or a Game Genie.  When you were a kid you did not give up playing Mario simply because the kid down the street had a Game Genie and a better controller.  No, you sat down and you kicked the crap out of Koopa with the tools you had available.  You saved that damned princess no matter how many castles you had to crush.  Life is the same way. Somewhere along the way, society teaches us that it is not us.  We are not the ones.  I am here to tell you that every single person reading this or not reading this was put here for a reason.  It should be our life long goal to figure out that reason.  Yes, we should raise children, have a family, have faith, go to the gym, and have all of those other things that make a life fulfilled for most people.  Bu

Change your thoughts, change your life! Imagine for a second that you are in complete control of your destiny.  Anything that you want good, you can have.  All you have to do is go get it. In life we are bombarded by outside sources telling us what we should and shouldn't do.  From the TVs on our walls, the books that we read, our parents, our friends, our spouses, the Internet, the radio, and many other outside sources.  They all quite literally make us think in certain ways.  Repeat something enough and it becomes the truth.  This is true for good things and for not-so-good things. Personally, I wasn't always a spiritual man.  I was raised catholic and as soon as I was able, I quit going to church.  I found it to be a waste of time.  But the truth is, I wasn't listening to the message. How many of us are going through life listening to the wrong message?  I know I was.  I know a lot of people who were and many who still are.  We are very easily manipulated and we don&

So make sure you think about good stuff. If you have read any of my stuff in the past you will realize that I firmly believe in the reaping and sowing process.  If you look all around in nature you can see all of the signs.  When you plant wheat, you get wheat, when you plant corn, you get corn.  Now along with these plants come weeds.  This is part of nature.  In our mind when we plant positive thoughts, we also get the negative thoughts.  It is our duty to weed on a daily basis. This whole thing is a process and it starts slowly.  One does not simply buy an acre of land and produce a bounty of produce.  You must till the land, make the soil fertile, and after many seasons your soil becomes more easily worked.  The mind is the same way.  Everyday we must work the soil of our mind by tilling up the old thoughts and clearing the land for new seeds. A great way to clear the mind is meditation.  I used to think this was nonsense until my mind was so cluttered with negative thoughts th

Be comfortable in change, it is what we are meant to do. Getting to the root of who we are as humans has been something I have been interested in as of late.  In order to understand where we are going, we must first now where we have been.  Personally, we were able to trace part of my heritage back to William Wallace, which is cool.  Throughout history we can see the lessons of mankind, but unfortunately not a lot of us like to look at history.  If we did, we wouldn't repeat it so much, but I regress. All along the path of humans to where we are now, the only constant has been change.  You ancestors were the strong, the lucky, and the adapted.  We must remember, our brain has not caught up to the way we live now.  Our monkey brain is still in adaptation.  We are still using the same brain that kept the cavemen alive and allowed us to survive as a species.  It wasn't until we were able to preserve and/or cook food that our brains really started to develop into what we know it

Be prepared and embrace it. It wasn't too long ago that I had made a pretty bold statement to the universe.  My brother John had passed away and I was getting on with my life.  Standing in the gym one day just thinking about how I had gotten through all of that and pretty ego driven.  I kept saying "Is that all you got?".  Basically begging the universe to bring me more.  "C'mon, let's see what else you got...dead brother, that's nothing."  Well I am here to tell you, the universe, God, whatever you want to choose to believe in brought it with such a strong force that it eventually humbled me into a puddle of human flesh.  At one point I was laying on my bed trying to think of how to end it all.  Just physically and mentally anguished. In 2016, as fate would have it I got handed a little music festival called "The Austin Dam Show".  Again, I thought: "How hard could this be?" Well, I here to tell you, it was hard.  People tha

and that's okay! Look around you.  See what you have created.  It has all been done through you.  Your thoughts, words, and actions.  The people in your life, your financial situation, your job, your relationships, they are all part of your belief system.  If you don't like what you have created, change it, you are not a tree. It is the greatest thing about humans.  The reason we are here and where we are today is because of our ability to adapt.  Now, we will adapt to any situation.  We must remember we are dealing with a primal brain that is not used to having all of these things at the touch of a button.  Access to food, clothing, shelter, sexual gratification, we have it all and we can have it all right now.  This is great on a lot of levels, but we have to be disciplined. You want food, there's an app for that.  You want clothing, we have access to cheap and sometimes free clothing.  Shelter is abundant.  Sexual gratification?  Porn is EVERYWHERE.   Anything we want