Tiny Buddha

Tag: conscious

  • How to Convince Your Brain to Change Your Habits and Your Life

    How to Convince Your Brain to Change Your Habits and Your Life

    “To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.” ~Unknown

    Heroes inspire us all. They are strong, smart, and powerful. They manage to win against all odds. They will keep going no matter what.

    They may feel fear but fear does not get them. And just when you thought that they were done, it was over, and that there was no way they could overturn the situation, they rise back out of the blue, strike, and win!

    Then they cross the finish line. Glory awaits them. From now on everyone will remember them for the great people they were.

    Oh, the path of glory.

    We get addicted to this path. We want to be heroes so badly. And we fight, we do our best, we give our all, yet many of us are failing.

    I didn’t recognize the reason behind our shortcomings until I realized that there are actually two types of heroes: the glory-focused type and the down-to-earth type.

    Let’s take exercise and healthy eating as an example.

    Many people decide to live healthier, especially in January with New Year’s Resolutions.

    They believe that this time they will make it happen! Glory awaits them! And they march. Full-speed. They do very well—at least in the first few weeks.

    Then they slowly start running out of steam. They cannot hold on to their diets as they did, and they skip more and more workouts. A large percentage of them will have quit by the second week of February.

    No glory for the quitters, only blame and guilt. They didn’t try hard enough. They gave up too easily. They were lazy. Or, they just did not want to change badly enough. (more…)

  • Set Yourself Free: 3 Ideas to Become More Conscious

    Set Yourself Free: 3 Ideas to Become More Conscious

    “I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.” ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

    I’m sitting on a straw bail at an unplugged rock concert that’s being held in Barrydale, South Africa, my current home and sanctuary. It’s a big deal for this small town, because nothing much ever really happens here.

    Everyone from the area has arrived dressed to the hilt and ready to rumba—except me, that is. I’m sitting to the side (in an outfit that will scare away most normal people) staring forlornly off into the distance.

    My buddy Sean sits next to me with a smile the size of the bread roll he’s holding in his hand. He jokes around and chats away like today might be his last day on earth, while I try hard to flash some teeth at least once every twenty minutes, just so I don’t ruin the party for everyone else.

    I probably won’t remember this concert at all in a couple of years’ time. It will become an unidentifiable part of the gray mass of other lost memories that make up most of my life.

    I guess I’m somewhere in my head, sorting through what I perceive to be the missing pieces of my life. I’m here, but I’m not really here at all. I’m so absorbed in dissecting the future and the past and my perception of my life that I’m completely missing what’s happening around me. I can’t see it at all.

    If I could manage to let go of my own expectations of life—just for a second—and zoom out a little bit, I would probably see that in the context of the bigger picture, my worries do not warrant this behavior, not in the least. It takes some doing, but in the end I finally get there.

    Most of us spend our lives living in a kind of insular trance. We are essentially asleep to the world.

    The older we get, the more our lives become like the predictive text on our cell phones: we have a fairly good idea of our day, the route we’ll take, the things that will come up and the people we will see, and our minds just kind of fill in the blanks. (more…)