Inlightened Enterprises - Midlife Messages Blog

In our modern society, even people who are retired have a lot of demands on their time. To find time to seek God we have to simplify our lives; there is no way around it. So much time is wasted in the endless pursuit of “newer and better” material possessions. What is the result of our culture’s obsession with material acquisitions? The Buddha put it very succinctly: “Those who have cows have care of cows.” So, take time today or sometime this week to do an analysis of your life: How much time do you put into
caring for all the unnecessary “necessities”-the “toys” that the media and advertisements have made you believe you can’t live without? And, see where you can MAKE time for spiritual practice. I recommend no less than an hour a day – and the Dalai Lama once said, if it is too hard to find an hour, you need two!

In addition to a specific time set aside for prayer and meditation, find ways to bring God into your life every day as much as possible. At the monastery we were reminded by bells five times a day to pay attention to God.  I thought I could take that practice home by using the telephone – mine rings at least 5 times a day!  We can use that continual reminder to bring our  minds back to God, and this will go a long way towards helping us keep our inner balance.

Ultimately, the secret of balance is to put God first. Paramahansaji Yogananda reminds us, “giving God a second place is giving God no place.”  Yet how often do we indeed give God second place, third place, fourth place, eighth place, tenth place, because we feel everything else is more pressing. It’s a flaw in our human nature. We continually delude ourselves that “No, I have to do this; I can’t afford to miss that”-and so we end up putting off our spiritual practice, or forgoing it completely. We have
to discipline ourselves to overcome that. Schedule your life; plan a balanced routine of meditation so that you’re getting a set amount every day, and then follow it. Should you fail on occasion, just try again. Persevere. When you make the determination, “I will do it, no matter what,” you will see a wonderful change come into your life. Drs even have proven that blood pressure and other bodily functions come into balance when we spend time daily in prayer.

How much time do you spend during a month in silence?  Do you give yourself at least one day a month to focus on your spiritual life?  How many of you take at least a week at least once a year for a retreat – to focus on your spiritual connection?

If we say that God is number one and that our spiritual lives are our first priority, how well do our schedules show it?

How many of us remember the scriptural commandment: “Keep holy the Sabbath.” I don’t mean just to be able to mouth it – but, remember to practice it.  What happens to you when you hear me say, at least one day a week should be given to spiritual pursuit?  I believe that as we “remember the Sabbath”, we will  find that are leading a much more balanced and healthy life-physically, mentally, and spiritually.

Suppose we are giving one day to committed spiritual practice.  What about the other six?  When we speak of Balance as a spiritual quality, we are also speaking of living life on Purpose – as I said earlier, having time to do everything that is important to you.  Check out how you spend your life. Are you truly living and spending time on what is important to you?   For example, When did you take your last vacation?  Does your work consume more of your time than you’d like? 
Are you seeing signs of burnout?  When was the last time you took time to play? Making time for hobbies you enjoy-is a necessary component of spiritual and psychological balance. You will get much more accomplished in your work and in your spiritual life, and you will be healthier physically-if you remember this

Want to listen to more about BALANCE  You can order the MP3 on Balance by clicking here NOW 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Yin and Yang of life. How do you balance the need to take action and make things happen with the need to allow them to happen? I believe that in our society, more people need to move towards allowing than towards doing more. We are a community of doers.  We judge ourselves on our accomplishments.  True, there are many couch potatoes in our world, but, I believe they are that because they have been so busy doing and are looking for a way out and don’t know any other.

I’ve been meditating since I was about 12-13 and so, yes, I am an advocate of meditation. But lately, I’m even more an advocate of simple stop and reflect and check your guts type of living. I find the days I ask myself after each activity, okay — what’s next? I find myself being led to actually DO more and feel more relaxed.  Some days I even tell myself I don’t have to work today - and then ask - what do you want to do next? More often than not, I accomplish more on those days then when I have a long checklist and plan. The reflection continues.  I’m sure you’ll be hearing more from me on this topic.

In the meantime, I’d love to know what YOU think about this?

A man lived by the side of the road and sold hot dogs.  He was hard of hearing so he had no radio.  He had trouble with his eyes so he read no newspaper, nor did he watch t.v.  But, he sold great hot dogs.  He put a sign up on the highway telling how great they were.    He stood by the side of the road and cried, “Hey, You, want to buy a great hot dog?”  And people came and they bought.  So, he increased his meat and bun order.  He bought a bigger stove to
take care of his trade.  Then one day his son came home from college to help him.  His son said, “Dad, haven’t you heard the news about the recession?  The economy is really bad.  The unemployment situation is terrible.  The energy situation is worse.”

Whereupon the hot dog man thought, “Well my son’s been to college.  He reads the newspapers and listens to the radio, he ought to know.”  So the father cut down on his meat and bun order.  He took down his advertising signs.  He no longer bothered to stand by the side of the road and yelled “Wanna buy my hot dogs?”  And his hot dog sales fell almost over night.  “You’re right son.” The hot dog man said to his boy.  “We certainly are in the middle of a bad recession!”

This parable is an illustration of these words of Dr. Ernest Holmes in Chapter 18 of the Science of Mind:

As God’s thought makes worlds, and peoples them with living things, so our thought makes our world and peoples it with our experiences.  By the activity of our thought, things come into our life and we are limited only because we have not known the Truth.  We have thought that outside things controlled us, when all the time we have had that within which could have changed everything and given us freedom from bondage.

What is that within us that can give us freedom?  The creative Power of God operating through The Law of Attraction, which we bring into Action by our thoughts.

This idea is not new. It has been espoused throughout the ages.

The Buddha told us:

All that we are is the result of what we have thought.

In Proverbs 23:7, we read:

For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.

Jesus said:

It is done unto you as you believe. And  - As ye sow so shall ye reap.

Aristotle wrote:

What we expect, we find.

The philosopher Virgil said:

They can because they think they can.

William Shakespeare wrote: 

Our doubts are our traitors.

Contemporary writer Eknath Easwaran wrote:

We begin to resemble and actually become whatever we give our attention to.

Abraham-Hicks:  

When you think a little thought of something you are wanting, by Law of Attraction, that thought grows larger and larger and more and more powerful. When you think a thought of something you are not wanting, that Law of Attraction adds unto it and it grows larger and larger also. So the larger it grows, the more power it draws unto it, then the more certain you are to receive the experience, you see.

The interesting thing about these Laws is that they are — even if you do not understand that they are — affecting your experience, even in your ignorance of them.

The law of attraction is definitely not a new concept - but a statements of Truth — Truth that can set us free — or hold us in bondage depending on what we do with them!

There is no power in the universe but ourselves that can free us.  Someone may help us on the road to realization, but we must bring ourselves to the place in mind where there is no misfortune, no calamity, no accident, no trouble, no confusion; where there is nothing but plenty, peace, power, Life and Truth.

At all times we are either drawing things to us or pushing them away.  In the average individual, this process goes on without his or her knowing it, but ignorance of the law does not change its results.

Did you know that an eagle knows when a storm is approaching long before it breaks? The eagle will fly to some high spot and wait for the winds to come. When the storm hits, it sets its wings so that the wind will pick it up and lift it above the storm. While the storm rages below, the eagle is soaring above it.
The eagle doesn’t escape the storm. It simply uses the storm to lift it higher. It rises on the winds that bring the storm.

I am also reminded that a jet plane spends 95% of the time in flight being off course, but gets to its destination by a continual process of slight corrections.  I think that’s an apt metaphor for balance in our lives.  It’s not staying the course without error, but continual correction to come back to center.

That reminds me of a joke – it’s about balancing a check book!

Tired of having to balance his wife Cindy’s checkbook, Mike made a deal with her; he would look at it, but only after she had spent a few hours trying to wrestle it into shape.
The following night, after spending hours poring over stubs and figures, Cindy said proudly, ‘I’ve done it! I made it balance!’
Impressed, Mike came over to take a look. ‘Let’s see… mortgage 550.00, electricity 70.50, phone 35.00.’ His brow wrinkled as he read the last entry. ‘It says here ESP, $615. What the heck is that?’  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘That means, Error Some Place!

Balance is not staying the course without error, but continual correction to come back to center! – whatever it takes!!

I just came back from a retreat with a group of ministers spent at a Benedictine Abbey in Kansas City.  We used the four elements of the Rule of St. Benedict as our focus for each of the first four days. Wouldn’t you know — the first day was about BALANCE! (there are no accidents in life!)   The exhortation was that we needed a blending in life of work and recreation, inner and outer work, speaking and silence and attention both to the physical and spiritual aspects to our lives.  The harmonizing
of these seeming opposites makes life work.   Where in your life are you with these aspects?

Many parts of our life need to be brought into balance, and they may seem to conflict with each other: responsibilities to our family, earning a living, maintaining our health, giving attention to our spiritual lives, keeping up with the deluge of information required to function in the world today, our duties to community or church activities, and the myriad of other demands on our time and energy.

Everywhere we look we can see examples of people who are out of balance. There are people with heart attacks from years of poor eating habits and lack of exercise. There are people who are too much in their heads, who haven’t integrated head and heart. There are spiritual giants who die agonizing deaths from wasting illness from years of denying or neglecting the body. There are people so caught up in caring for their bodies, minds, and social lives that they never think about their spiritual nature. And there
are people so caught up in their feelings that they neglect their minds, or fail to use their reasoning ability; they, too, have failed to integrate head and heart.

To balance all these aspects of our life we need something to balance them on, some point of equilibrium. The more complex our lives become, the more we need to realize that there is only one reliable point of balance-and that is God. Only God pervades everything, underlies all the material and spiritual activities of life. We have to learn to make God our balance point. There is no other answer. When I look at life with clear understanding, it all boils down to this: Balance means finding God; and finding God
is all about spiritual practice.

Want to listen to more about BALANCE  You can order the MP3 on Balance by clicking here NOW 

Do you make time in your life for everything that is important to you?  Notice I said MAKE not HAVE – because we all have exactly the same amount of hours in a day and days in a year.  It’s how we choose to use them that makes the difference.

Today our topic, the Quality of God that we are focusing on is BALANCE.  Some people think they are in balance when they feel like they have everything in CONTROL in their lives. Or for those of you who are LIBRA’s, it’s a constant desire to weigh and measure things to be certain they are coming out just right. That kind of balance reminds me of being on a teeter-totter when I was young.  When you and the other person were exactly even, it actually was NO FUN!

There is a difference between “spiritual   balance” and what can be called a “balancing act.” One comes from God’s work within us to bring order and priority to our lives. The other relies on outside resources to organize our time and tasks. In seeking to achieve balance in our lives, it is important to understand the difference. A balancing act is an outward attempt to meet the demand of the many responsibilities of our lives. We think that in order to achieve balance, we need to Focus on organizing
tasks, time and  responsibilities, becoming more organized, developing better time management skills. The results of this type of effort are helpful but have limited impact. The balance we need and desire. Spiritual Balance is something that comes from God and something we get to experience more as we seek to know God more intimately.  Balance as a Quality of God focuses on being rather than doing and reflects God’s priority for our lives. Spiritual balance is achieved as we vigilantly make knowing
and trusting God the priority of our lives each day.

Balance, as a quality of God, then, is not about having it all together, or having nothing ruffled in your inner or outer being.  That’s a nice goal in life, but remember we aren’t talking about things we have to work towards here, but things we need to uncover because they are our natural tendencies.  The Qualities of God are our inheritance.  It is who we are at core and who we something forget.

I like to think of Balance as the blending of seeming opposites in life.  In God, and focusing on God as a priority in life, we discover that there are no opposites; there is no duality. Yet, in our experience, we see things that way all the time.  In our lives, for example, we label our experiences as UPS and DOWNS and most of us want to spend most of our time feeling UP!

I once had a very wise lawyer who told me that I could expect my business and my life to be like a roller coaster – it’s got it’s ups and downs.  Actually, the down part of the roller coaster ride is the most exhilarating IF we learn to relax into it.

Most of us would like to have life be a series of wonderful events one after another, with NOTHING happening that upsets or disturbs us in any way.  I’ve come to see that the upsets in my life, are the greatest vehicle to my spiritual growth.  The foundress of my former religious community, Mother Mary Veronica used to say, “The best growing days are the days the sun does not shine.” 

Want to listen to more about BALANCE  You can order the MP3 on Balance by clicking here NOW 

A “Crazy” New Way to Increase Sales

– from Zero

by Dr. Joe Vitale
www.mrfire.com

In my new book, “Zero Limits,” I talk about
the unusual therapist who helped heal an entire
hospital ward of mentally ill criminals –
without seeing any of them.

I’ve since learned his method for healing,
which involves “cleaning” yourself of all
negativity in order to see change in others.

It seems bizarre, but when you take care of
your own issues, they disappear in other people.

The whole idea is to love the problems away.
You do it by saying “I love you,” and a few other
statements, non-stop. I’ve been doing it for two
years now and my life is astonishing. I live in
an almost moment-by-moment state of bliss.

Once I learned this method, I started to use
it on other things besides illness. Since I’m a
practical metaphysician and an entrepreneur,
I wanted to see if this wild method would work
on sales and other bottom line results.

Whenever I would write an article — much
like this one — I would send love into it.

Whenever I would write another book — like
my new one, “Zero Limits” — I would keep saying
“I love you” in my mind.

What I noticed is my emails and articles
would get read and distributed to *millions*
of people.

And my book, “Zero Limits,” became an
Amazon bestseller — six months *before* it
was published.

But I didn’t stop there in my testing.

Because I want to be sure this method works
for others and not just me, I taught it to my
close friends.

Bill Hibbler, coauthor with me of the book
“Meet and Grow Rich,” was skeptical. But he
borrowed a pre-publication copy of my book,
“Zero Limits,” read it, and started loving his
products and his list of  subscribers. Here’s
what he said:

“Sales for Jan 1-4 were 41.39% higher than
Dec 1-4. During the four day period in January,
I didn’t mail my list or launch any new promotion
during that time. All I did was clean while
reading your book and throughout the day.”

Bill went on to tell me he saw sales increase
from sites like http://create-ultimate-ebooks.com/
– which he wasn’t promoting *at all*.

How is this possible?

How can “cleaning” yourself with a mantra
like “I love you” make a difference in your sales?

It appears that there is nothing “out there.”
The entire world is a projection of what you feel
inside.

So, if you feel love, you will attract love.
Because love contains gratitude, you attract
more things to be grateful for. This is the essence
of my book, “The Attractor Factor,” and of course
of the movie, “The Secret.”

You get what you feel.

That’s it.

At heart I think you (I) just want love. Well, so
does everyone else. When you say “I love you”
inside yourself, you cleanse yourself and you
radiate an energy that others feel.

The result: more sales.

Still skeptical?

Look at it this way:

Even if this whole method seems totally crazy
to you, what harm can come from you saying “I
love you” in your mind as you make calls, write
emails, deliver pitches, and go about your day?

If nothing else, you’ll have better feeling
days.

Try it and see.

By the way, “I love you”.

******************************