In this article, I am going to teach you how to make your Gmail inbox the central hub of your Internet experience. Plus give you some more time saving automation tips including:

• Setting goals with Google
• Get Google to send you a to-do list every day like clockwork
• Filter your email like a pro (and labelling)
• How to sign up for services and avoid email spam
• Using easy-to-create scripts that work at any computer to save you tonnes of time
• Centralizing your notes in a place where they’re easy to recall (free!)
• Minimize Facebook/Twitter time and still get what you want in a way that suits you
• Moving your documents digitally into “the cloud”
• Execute simple emails to update Twitter/Facebook
• Upload videos and save notes from anywhere with email access (including your phone)

Setting Goals

Before this month I set goals on paper using the system I raved about in a previous article. I feel paper is equipment heavy and not flexible enough. Google can change appointments without looking messy. In my paper calendar, I’d write a goal, then change my mind and not have enough space to write a new one.

I was using a paper system because I felt I couldn’t handle working online because of distractions so I knew I had to face this challenge. You won’t see “Google Goals” being released any time but you can combine Google’s existing products to take care of all of your needs in a way that is free, flexible and bends to suit you.

For some, moving from paper to digital can make things more complicated but it doesn’t have to be the case. This system involves a bit of work upfront but after a week you will be plain sailing.

The first thing is to decide what goal to set yourself and identify a habit to get you there. If you want to start your own business writing online, you could install the habit of writing 1000 words per day. Now let Google do all the organizing for you.

If you don’t have a Google account yet, sign up for free here and get used to Google Calendar and Google Mail. If you prefer another email service then you can sign up for a Google account, and set Gmail to automatically forward your mail to your main account. You can set it up so all of your email addresses receives and sends email from this account.

Open Google Calendar and create a new calendar called “Routines”. On tomorrows date enter write 50 words. Then the day after than enter write 100 words and so on for the next 20 days increasing by 50 words per day. When you get to day 20 you will be at 1000 words and for the 10 days after that you will be solidifying the habit you’ve created. Enter into the calendar 1000 words per day on these last 10 days. Many days you will find yourself writing over your minimum but as long as you hit the minimum everything will be fine.

Now here’s the brilliant part. Go to the “My Calendars” on the left and click the arrow next to the calendar your habits are on and then click “Notifications”. Check the email box next to “Daily Agenda” near the bottom and click “Save”. From now on, every day you will get a reminder in your email inbox at 5am of what is in your Habits calendar for the day. You can change your calendar appointments any time before that email is sent and it will get updated.

If you want to be reminded that an event is coming up, you can set a reminder. Create a new event or click an old one to edit it and on the right under options, you can add an email reminder to appear at a time before the event determined by you.

If you want to set a new routine in your life I recommend you start on the first of the month. Go to Google Calendar and create an appointment on the first of the next month in your Routines calendar. If you want to get up at 5am, write that in the calendar and select when if it needs to be done at a specific time.

Now click “repeat”, scroll to “daily”. Check “until” and then click the last day of the calendar month. Return to your calendar and it should have a new appointment repeated daily for the next month. Now sync that calendar to Gmail like we did above, and it will remind you every day. Try not to focus on any other major goals during this time to maximise your focus and chance of success.

Gmail is so flexible that you can sync just one calendar or all of them. Here’s my current calendar setup:

To Do List (Blue) – Tasks that I’ve decided are priority for today.
Routines (Red) – Habits I’ve developed and am in the process of developing. eg. Raw food diet, daily exercise, wake at 5am. I create a single event, set it to repeat daily for the next month and if it goes well, the rest of the year.
What else is happening today (Turquoise) – Things that aren’t important enough to get on the To Do List but that I may do when it’s finished.

I mention the colours because in the email I can tell by colour what is most important.

All that’s in my morning inbox is my schedule for the day. The rest is sorted into folders to be processed after my tasks are complete. It might take a while to get to this point of just one email, but there’s no rush. Spam needs to be deleted and emails need to be filed correctly over time as they come in.

You can sometimes leave emails that are marked too. If you see something in ‘Paypal’, you might know it is a receipt for a payment and doesn’t need processing. Here’s what my email inbox looks like most mornings.

(Click to enlarge. It will open in a new window)

We sometimes get email from people who haven’t contacted us before and that’s not sortable, is it? If you want to give your email to someone who you meet on a night out but don’t want it messing up your clean inbox there is a work around. You’d usually write something like JohnSmith@gmail.com. Iif you change it to JohnSmith+3@gmail.com then the email will still get to your inbox. Anything you put after the ‘+’ sign and before the @ will be OK. Then go to Filters in Gmail, set a filter for all email with the words “Johnsmith+3@gmail.com” to go to a label called Socializing.

Sometimes you sign up for sites for access but don’t want any emails from them. They might send spam or pass on your data to someone else who does. Use this technique again to sign up with an email address like “JohnSmith+nottoday@gmail.com” and set a filter for all mail to that address to be deleted.



About Habits

Habits can get you anything you want in life. Success is repeated action in the right direction. It will feel all so natural after just 30 days. It’s June 1st today, and this would be a perfect opportunity as it has exactly 30 days. If you stick to this simple effective technique and let the system work for you, I promise you will find success.

Then, install a habit next month of improving your writing in a little way by 1% each day. A month from now your writing will be 34% better. Little daily changes are big overall changes. You won’t need extreme willpower because there is no time where you really have to push your comfort zone. You start small and build. Brick by brick.

I’ve used this to get paid writing posts. I set the goal of applying for 3 every day and got 4 within 2 weeks. I figured if I applied for 150 positions in a month, someone has to hire me! This system is magical in that failure is not possible. If you change your daily habits you can achieve anything.

I also used this to eat a 100% Raw Food Diet. I never thought I could at the start but now it felt like the most natural thing in the world. That’s the power of 30 days. It taught me a lot about the nature of mind. It tells you something is absolutely impossible and 30 days later you are living that impossible reality. That’s the power of a limiting belief.



Gmail Task List

Gmail has a simple yet great task tool in the left column of Gmail which can be opened to a full screen. When I get the to do list email each morning, I immediately put the list on the task list with the hardest task at the top of the list. This way, I’m always rewarded with an easier task.



Google Labs

Google Labs has great little features to help you in Gmail. Go to Gmail > Settings (top right) > Labs and browse. I use the “Send and Archive” button which allows you to send and archive an email in one click when it’s been sent and also use the “Undo Send” which allows you to undo sending a message up to 20 seconds afterwards. This is a real lifesaver! Other options include the hilarious “Mail Goggles” which makes you solve simple maths problems before you can send an email to make you think twice.



Gmail Shortcuts

Google has installed shortcuts for many of their programs which save you tonnes of time if you use their products daily. You can print off or just browse here:

• Gmail
• Google Docs
• Google Calendar
• Google Reader
• Google Search Shortcuts
• Youtube/Google Video – uses the same as Google Search Shortcuts. Great for finding specific videos

For Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Reader you can view the shortcuts by pressing “?” and then pressing “Esc” to remove it. Gmail Labs also has a feature to allow you to create your own shortcuts.



AutoHotKeys Scripts

Whilst we’re on the subject of shortcuts, let me introduce you to free program AutoHotKeys ( (about / download / quick start tutorial / forums). It’s a free tool which allows you to create keyboard shortcuts to simplify common tasks. It has many uses to save time. Don’t be put off by the way, I’ve never programmed a line of code in my life and found it simple to use.

I use it to do things like:

• pen regularly visited websites
• access my music
• shut down my computer in one second

I’ve set it up so the useless key between ‘Alt Gr ‘and ‘Ctrl’ is set up to minimize all windows and maximize once pressed again. It removes the need for clutter on my desktop as I can just link to them all.

The best thing is that you can download a .exe file of the script you have created and email it to yourself in Gmail (or upload to Google Docs storage) and run it from any Windows machine with email access. The Google Docs storage is 1GB total and 250MB maximum for a single file. It can be found here and is a great replacement for your USB stick.

If you get confused about what the shortcuts are, I’d recommend creating a desktop background with them on so you see them regularly. Also, use each one with a letter that makes sense. You might want to use “Windows Key and D” to open Google Docs. I’ve added the basics of my AutoHotKeys script here which you can use as a basis or add to your own script.



What about Google having all my data?

I don’t feel scared that Google or Facebook will abuse my data to a level that will bother me. The whole uproad about Facebook recently only affected me because I wanted to lower the amount that I used Facebook anyways rather than that I cared about my data. But I realise others are a lot more private than me. If anything absolutely major did come up I’m sure I would find out and there are many alternatives. You could go from

Google’s Picasa –> Flickr
Google Docs –> Zoho
Facebook Video –> Youtube/Vimeo – I’d actually start with Youtube for uploading videos for business OR personal video. Facebook video is terrible.
Facebook Status Updates —> Twitter only

I just like how clean and efficient Google is and expect to use them for a long time.



How to stop wasting time on Twitter/Facebook

There’s a couple of free tools that I use that are fantastic for this. The first one is TweetByMail (free). Staying with the theme of controlling everything from Gmail, it allows me to send emails to update my Twitter. I’ve used Facebook’s SelectiveTwitter application to automatically send my Tweets to Facebook whenever I end them with the hashtag #fb. This way I don’t have to visit the site where we will procrastinate.

The next one is my personal favourite and is called NutShellMail (free)

(Click to enlarge. It will open in a new window)

You can set up NutShellMail to land in your inbox before you wake just like the task list. It gives you a highly customizable email which tells you all about what’s gone on in the last 24 hours on your social networking pages. It works with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. It helps you to get rid of those annoying messages when someone comments on your wall or likes your status. You might think you will miss out on big social events but people will get hold of you another way.

You can stop Twitter sending you annoying update every time someone follows me through Twitter notification settings.

Since running this site, I like to update my followers on Twitter/Facebook but don’t want to have to log in 3-4 times to send them. This is where SocialOomph (free) comes in. It lets you send updates to Twitter at precise times. I tend to schedule 3 in the morning to publish at something like 9am, midday and 7pm, People still get updates from me and I don’t even have to be there.

Another great feature of SocialOomph if you’re running a business account is that it can send a message to new followers automatically to forward them to your site or tell them about yourself.



Google Docs

I use Google Docs to digitize nearly all text documents. I only have music stored on one computer. Google has mountains of space for my needs on Docs and odds are they have enough for you too. I store things like PDFs and scanned documents in my Skydrive account (free) because it has more space.

The filling system they have is great. You can add a bookmark-like star to important items, put items into folders and use the inbuilt search feature to find old or related articles. I store things like my goals list, ideas for posts and the posts themselves before they’re published. It automatically saves your post as you’re writing it and I’ve never had a situation where I was writing something and I lost it completely because my Internet cut off.

If you’re a fan of GTD (Getting Things Done) or similar systems, you can integrate Google Docs. If you have an “@My Boss” list for things you have to ask your boss about for example, you can create a document called @Boss and bring it up on your smart-phone via Google’s free docs application and update or read it there and then.

Docs also integrates with the book reading system that I recently blogged about.The basic principle is that you take notes on your books, upload these to Google Docs and only keep a few really high quality high books but you can read more here.



Uploading via Email

Sites that you can upload to via email include:

• Facebook Photo/Video
• Flickr Photos
• A WordPress blog where you store notes. You can store notes here whenever you get one via email which is great for those great ideas you get on the move (more on that later).
• Youtube Videos

If you add the email address to your Gmail contacts then you just start typing something like “Facebook upload” and it will come up. You don’t have to memorize the address. To add a contact, click “Contact” on the left in Gmail and above “My Contacts” click the “+” sign next to the little man and enter details.



Automating Reminders

For some things, you want to be reminded when they become available like videos of your latest shows etc – FeedMyInbox (free) is fantastic for this. You simply find the RSS Feed URL of the site you want the updates for and FeedMyInbox will automatically send you a link when the feed is updated. I use this for watching Family Guy (RSS feed link).

If you watch lots of videos on-line, the best quality ones tend to be Megavideo. They have a 72 minutes daily limit but this can be worked around. Make sure you’re using Firefox browser and download the Illimitux Add-on and follow on screen instructions.



Collecting Notes

I used to track my calorie intake on blogspot sites daily so I could see how far I’ve come and make improvements along the way. Now I send my emails to a site where I tag them in the email and they are automatically organised into tagged sections for recall later.

I email what I’ve eaten and the total calorie amount daily to my WordPress site and write [tags calories] at the bottom and if the tag hasn’t been created yet, it is created new on the site. All I have to do to get all the calorie posts is go to the site, click the tag and they’re all listed in chronological order.

This could be used with workouts or simply to collect interesting links online. The only tough thing is remembering the tags to use but if you make them simple you’ll be fine. I picked a minimal theme called Sandbox. It’ s easy to navigate and has the tags displayed under each post. Make sure when you are registering your blog to enable the option to not allow Search Engines access to your website if there is confidential information on there. To create your own WordPress site, click here (free).



A Great Side Benefit

I love looking on Google Calendar over the past few months and being able to see how far I have come in terms of personal development. The times when I couldn’t get up at a regular time and slept all day keep me humble but also confident that I can do anything if I put my mind to it. It’s like a vision board for you except it’s looking back rather than forwards for motivation.



The Final Goal

You’ll get to a point where your email is extremely efficient. You set goals online, you have all of your documents/pictures/videos in “the cloud” (stored online) and your Twitter/Faceboo is minimized to what you want. Your email in-box is your processing centre for everything on-line and is constantly updated with everything you want, want to add and you’re free to change at any time.

I recommend blocking out a few spare hours to upload everything from your calendar to Google Calendar and then throwing away your old one so you are not tempted to go back to it. Upload the documents you currently have on your computer to Google Docs. If it makes you feel comfortable then back them up to your desktop using Google Gears too.

I stayed at my brothers house last night and did my first workout there. My legs were killing me from the last 2 days of football running and all that bike riding. Adding todays workout and my legs are so heavy and clumsy at the moment. I only had 4 hours sleep and it’s catching up with me now.
I did my standard Legs workout of Calf Raises and Squats with a barbell across my shoulders which in total weighted 25kg in total. I’m gonna start small and add 5kg each time so that I don’t go overboard at the start and hurt myself. I did 5 seconds up and 5 seconds down which definitely added to the intensity of the workout. I plan to continue this 5 up, 5 down set of reps. It’s shorter and more high intensity than the Tabatas and I’ll still do the running on a Sunday.

Yesterday I deciede on a whim to go Raw for a couple of days and felt pretty decent when I did my workout this morning but I’m gonna give it up for now. I have too much going on in my life already. Maybe in April/May. Difficulty 5/10. I’m staying at my brothers from now on so will hopefully be able to use the weights every day in the morning and progressively add weight to the barbell. It’s also 16 days until I get my own weights too!

We all have friends that make you feel great. On the other hand, we have friends who make you feel awful. The questions is, why do you still hang around with them?

This isn’t a rhetorical question.

Why?

Actually ask yourself because it gives you clarity to see what answers come back.

My excuse was I didn’t want to socialize with them but felt I had no choice. I work from home so had a pretty introverted social life. 99% of my friends were energy drainers. They’re on the same level and I was at that level for a long time. I started improving my life quickly and felt a huge disconnect from them. They seemed happy to just get by.

I don’t believe that there are a lack of friends out there that are like you, you are a proof that humans can reach that level. It’s a valuable lesson to teach these people to have high self respect and you could teach them that by not taking their rubbish and moving on. Haven’t all lessons that you’ve learnt in your own life come from someone respecting themselves too much for a level of treatment and rising above it. You could give this lesson to someone else.

I try not to be angry at them. We’ve all been there and they’re just not ready yet. Just keep knowing it’s for their good and your own.

First Step

Get a list of the people that you have seen in the last month. Estimate how many hours you spend with each person. In the column after that note how you feel after being around them. -5 and 5 being each end of the scale. Feel free to include family as well, they’re not exceptional to this.

-5: Amazing and refreshed
-3: Considerably better than when we met
-1: Feel better but barely
0: Feel no difference (neutral)
1: Feel worse but barely
3: Considerably worse than when we met
5: Terrible and depressed

Now compile that list. Just open Notepad, it’ll take a second and you’ll get some real eye opening data. Now what you do is create a final column which is a multiplication of the hours spent and energy.

It should look like this at the end.

Friend A – 30 hours (Energy 5) = 150
Friend B – 3 hours (Energy -3) = -90
Friend C – 10 hours (Energy -5) = 0

From the above example it is obvious that this person spends too much time with Friend A. The high score indicates this. On the other hand Friend B leaves them feeling “Considerably better than when we met” but only 3 hours a week is spent with them. Stop seeing friend A and see friend b for those 30 hours you’re making up for. It’s simple, and effective.

The lower numbers are areas of improvement and the the higher numbers mean you should cut back contact with that person.

The Source

A social mentality that a lot of people have is that there is a head of a group of friends, sometimes called an “alpha”. They are the groups energy source. This can be a good or a bad thing but one thing that is certain is that being around them seriously affects you.

Positive energy people are head of the group because people see their positive energy and warm to it, it makes them feel good. Negative energy people are head of the group because people live in fear. The difference is chalk and cheese. Fear and Love.

The Energy Drainers

These people suffer from varying degrees of Excusitis and can often by found holding up and helping maintain each others limiting beliefs about life by relaying how terrible their day has been. Conversation topics regularly centre on

1. The Weather (Mainly my fellow Brits)
2. What “That idiot” did to me, and
3. Their own “bad luck”.

These people can easily be spotted and I know you all know one of them, maybe personally.

How do you know which you are? Here’s a little test.

Do your friends reveal deep things to you? Would they tell you a secret that they wouldn’t tell others? If the answer is no then you’re probably a negative energy person or a neutral one at best. It’s cool though, we’ve all been there. Just have the guts to admit it and move on.

Amplified Energy

The reason these two sets of people don’t mix is that their energies are opposites. The high energy people might as well not exist to the lower energy ones. All the lower energy people can see is their low energy friends and their mind thinks “Sheesh, maybe life really is just hard and everyone is suffering like this”. This is why meeting new people is such a thrilling experience. You find sides to yourself you didn’t even know you had.

When a group of really high or really low energy people get together, their energy is multiplied to more than the sum of their parts. Let me explain that. 10 high energy people together can change the world permanently for the good and 10 low energy people have their energy multiplied to create human shames like 9/11 and The Holocaust. They’re not that insane on their own. It’s thinking as a group that turns you insane.

How many positive world changing people worked alone and how many world changing negative people worked in a group? This is why you have to be so conscious of your energy level and that of those around you. Do you think Hitler or the 9/11 bombers thought that they were influenced by others? Of course not. They are unconscious to what’s happening.

Turning Up Your Energy

Firstly, realise that you can’t just start to socialize with the highest energy people starting today. They know about low energy and are well prepared.. They set up systems of mazes and hoops that you have to jump through to get to them. Low energy people will shit all over your high energy if they get to you. Most of them will give up after a few hurdles it’s too hard and they don’t want it that badly. It’s Darwin all over again. Only the strongest will get through and that’s the entire purpose of it.

You have to change yourself first. You have to shift to that level and you will find high positive energy attracts itself and people will pop up from nowhere.. If you have to sit indoors for a month, so be it. This is a life changing proposition I’m offering here. Here’s how its done:

Be Grateful – High Energy people appreciate things. They find gratitude in the simplest things like a quiet coffee with friends. Find something you can appreciate, anything. Ask yourself the question “What could I be appreciative of right now if I had to find something?” then listen.

Start Mixing With Less Friends – High energy people don’t just socialize with tonnes of people. They have 5 friends who are AMAZINGLY high energy them rather than 50 friends with ” I’m getting by” energy. When you have to deal with lots of people you have to deal with lots of different levels of energy and that’s just going to make your energy go haywire all day.

Stop Feeling Obligation – If a person does not depend on you for one of the 5 basic needs (housing, food, water, money and housing) then the best social lesson you can give them is to leave them if they have really low energy. Don’t think a number of years doing something makes you good at it or means you should stay with them. Being friends for 10 years often means you’ve not grown enough.

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P.S. – Whilst writing this article I was interrupted by phonecalls and a knock on the door from my biggest personal energy drain (unfortunately a family member). And just thought I’d tell you about the synchronicity. The universe is always listening to your thoughts.

Buddha started on breath awareness but he didn’t just remain concentrated on his breath all of his life. He transcended that teaching and moved on after it has served its purpose. If you say to a rookie spiritual seeker “yeah, just become aware of your awareness” they will just look at you blankly and try and make some kind of mental construct of concept out of it. You have to lead the mind slowly.

When you meditate upon things you are still not completely aware of the stillness and formless within but it’s at least a start. It concentrates your mind and at least severs the idea that you are body, thought or anything else. When you’ve totally focused on something your mind is still.

As you get used to this state and master it you will experience the state of inner stillness and its beauty which is beyond words. Infinitely more beautiful than any physical possession. It’s the connection with what you truly are. You see it in someone who has a child and suddenly becomes more vibrant, alive and childish looking. They’ve connected with source and experienced stillness of the mind.



Removing The Crutches

Now you have realised a still mind, you are ready to take off your crutches and allow it to become your natural state. What you do is switch the focus from external things (the object of your focus) to awareness of awareness itself. This sounds complicated but it’s you completely natural state under all the mind made noise.

My technique for doing this is that I sit in a cross-legged state in a dark room. I do this so that I can stop my mind focusing on objects and I close my eyes to gain as much focus as possible. Then I sit at the gate of my mind where things enter and leave and just become aware of the inner stillness. At the start my mind is often busy and I have to acknowledge and become aware of thoughts. Whenever you realize that a thought has took my attention elsewhere on a little journey I just watch it, forgive it until it vanishes and return to silence.

You will eventually get to the point where you are just pure timeless awareness. You are not aware of a body or thoughts. It’s blissful. You can tell how close you are by the degree of lightness and inner peace you feel. When you connect with that state the ecstasy just multiplies the longer you say there, deeper and deeper. It might scare you at first with its power, go into it in degrees.

If at any point you feel like the mind noise is all too much, just internally and silently forgive and accept your state. Then move on from there. I can’t say how long it takes to get to that place because it requires the acknowledgement of timelessness and forgetting your space in time as that is a thought form.



The Stateless State

Once you’ve learned how to access this state it will become more and more prevalent in your life. You will feel an inner peace with you wherever you go that you can amplify at any time and a knowing of being one with all (coincidentally my favourite type of pizza). If you are struggling to find an answer then to this place and silence your mind and the answer will be given to you. God speaks his truth in feelings to a silent mind.



Your Minds Resistance

Your mind will always resist going to this place, ALWAYS! You will find it making up ridiculous excuses just to stop and distract you. It does this because it is fighting for its existence. It wants control of you and at the moment it has it. Old habits die hard. If you want mind control then you will just have to see through this and put yourself into meditation. That’s the hardest part.

One night before sleep, after gaining a great amount of control back from my mind, I was visualizing that I was in my body the following morning getting out of my bed turning off my alarm and going for a shower. Simple, right? Well when I got up the following morning I lay in my bed and I was aware of my mind telling me that I’d reset my alarm for an earlier time and that I should go back to bed. This wasn’t the “close your eyes for just.. another .. second” thought. It scared me a little and I got up. This all happened after just an hour of deep meditation daily, for about 3 or 4 days in a row.

Your mind is full of illusory concepts which it believes are reality. Reality is in constant flux while concepts remain rigid. Something had to give. I’ll take this as a good sign though as I read somewhere that Buddha saw the illusion of horsemen on a chariot galloping towards him just before he reached enlightenment as his mind was trying to fool him.



Appreciation

I found that without any conscious effort, I just started appreciating things massively. My fear of death just started to fall to the side in the place of gratitude and deep love of all, and sleep became incredibly deep and restoring. I’d awaken extremely alert as if I’d slept for years. I started to feel and know that life was living through me rather than the other way around, I’d touched the immortality of the human spirit and it is breathtaking.

A couple of days ago, I bought myself a winter coat with matching hat and it made me feel so amazing. It was as if gratitude and love just burst through my chest and swallowed me up. and after it had died down I just had no fear and it’s aura stayed with me for days. Go to this place, it’s the most beautiful, natural restoring thing you can do for yourself and others who come into contact with you.

Many people are actually controlled by their emotions. Just consider that for a second. If you are controlled by your emotions, are you ever fully in control? Can you say to a family member that relies on you “I’ll be there for you in hard times” and one day you don’t know how to control emotions within you, then you might not fulfil that promise? If you feel angry and you physically or verbally lash out, you were not in control at that point if you regret it immediately. If you were in control you would not have took that action. What then was in control? You were letting your emotions run through you and your autopilot habits took over. This is acting out of conditioning which is the old level of consciousness that humans are leaving. The new one is free from emotional bondage.

Emotional control paradoxically comes from first letting yourself become vulnerable to your emotions and accepting them. So many people deny their emotions and resist them. Resistance always causes an object to become stronger. Once you accept and make yourself vulnerable to an emotion it is allowed to flow through the wall of resistance that you have created and learning how to control emotions is found in this surrender. This sounds abstract, and it is, but you just have to experience this rather than listen to it explained. When an emotion comes to you just sit and be with it. Don’t judge it, just recognise it and it’s released from your system along with its past.

There is a you observing the emotions and the emotions themselves. When you do not deeply realise this simple truth then when an emotion arises, you become it. You get a raise at work, you become happy, you become the raise. As that happiness goes you try and get it back because it felt so blissful, as the raise goes, you have attached yourself to the raise and the emotional feelings that accompanied it. This is why you feel so under attack when things go wrong. You have duped yourself into thinking you are dying.

How to Control Emotions: The System

The that this works always follows a similar pattern which is:

• Recognition/Awakening
• Acceptance
• Meaning
• Observation
• Release

RAMOR! Sounds like an evil Aries noodle monster or something. (Ramen Noodles. Aries is a Ram … Ah screw it … my humour is wasted on you guys!).

Let’s go into them a little further shall we?

• Recognition/Awakening – This is where you realise that you have been under and have been controlled by your emotions. This the most critical step. If you stay unconscious to the emotions ruling and running your life then the other 3 steps are impossible. You will all of a sudden realise “This isn’t me, I’m getting emotionally controlled here”.

• Acceptance – The first step that seems logical is to get angry that you are experiencing negative emotions. Darkness cannot bring light to darkness! Watch your mind trying to get angry and just accept this. Accept that this emotion is here right now and is in your system. It is unconsciousness trying to come out of you which is a good thing.

• Meaning – Emotions arise within you to bring your attention to important things like reminding you to be compassionate. Note what the emotion is telling you to do and ask how would your higher self deal with this? Resolve to take action in the next 24 hours. The emotion is now ready to be released.

• Observation – Now you have recognised and accepted the emotion is there, observe it, partially. When you’re done or if it is not important then just observe how the emotion makes you feel physically and what it does to you mentally. Notice the subtle links between the two. Make it your aim to be as alert as possible as if a burglar has entered your home and you are trying to sense him with all sense. Just feel your body as a field, what area is claiming your attention. Give it your non judging attention.

If you do not do this the emotion will stay clogged in your system and leave behind a residue of sorts which will clog up your being. Also, acceptance is important in this step as you must just keep observing the emotion is out of your system and peace is returned, it can be a tough process but keep reminding yourself to accept what is. This step of observation also brings in the critical noticing that you are not your emotions, body or mind but are in fact observing them. This step will take the longest.

• Release – When you keep accepting the emotion has served its purpose and is heading out of your inner energy system. You will know it had gone when you no longer feel its pulls and you feel a calm inside of you. This is the final step.

Asking how long this will take is like asking how long a piece of string is. It depends on experience, what emotion it is, the person in question etc. All I know is you will get better and more efficient at this process the more you do it.

Practical Techniques

If you feel a strong urge to do something that you know your better self would not do catch yourself doing it. Just keep watching the bodily sensations, the thoughts that accompany it etc and take no action. Eventually things will die down and you will be able to choose the better course with your clear, still and focused mind. It becomes easier with practice.

Emotions arise within you as a physical reaction to your mind. You can tell by someones body what emotions and what state of mind they are in. This also can work in reverse. If you want to feel extremely confident, then change your body posture to standing up tall, looking at the ceiling and smiling. It is impossible to feel terrible when you do this I tell you. This is more of a short term thing to give you an instant boost than a long term fix where real control is gained but it can work if you are about to ask someone out or make a speech for example.

Sit and see what arises. Do not go too deep though as going into your emotions of the past is never ending. This is just to show you how the technique works. Watch your mind and when a thought arises and you get taken by that thought into its little world when you come back to presence from it, see what it has done to your body and mind. Feel that you were not there and it is a scary feeling, kind of as if you were sleeping.

When you start doing this you will start to notice just how unawakened you have been in your life before you learned how to control emotions. When thoughts and emotions are consuming you and you suddenly wake up into observation it starts to feel like you literally have woken up from a dream, the sensation is incredible. The whole of reality changes that moment.

You can literally do this at any time. It only takes one second to look inside and become aware of your emotional state. In a queue, in your silent moments make it a habit to look inside and ask “How do I feel now?”.

NOTE: These statistics come straight from the sites themselves. I am only quoting what they have mentioned that they’ve made. I don’t know any of these bloggers personally.

ShoutMeLoud.com

The owner of this blog started blogging full-time in March of 2009 and just look at how his income shot up. 8 months from starting he was earning £1922 or $3142 per month. A very comfortable income, especially for someone my age with few commitments. Or at least a pretty nice side income to add to the main one.

StevePavlina.com

Oct 04 – Steve Pavlina launches his website working full time on it.
Feb 05 – He decides to monetize his website with Adsense and makes $53 in the first month
Apr 05 – He’s now averaging $4.12/day ($124/month)
Oct 05 – Now earning $1000/month after a year of blogging
Dec 05 – $3000/month after 1 year 2 months
May 06 – $200/day ($6000/month) after 1 year 7 months blogging
Oct 06 – $1000/day after 2 years blogging
Nov 06 – $41,000/month – What a great income. He truly deserves it too, his site content is brilliant.
Oct 09 (5 years in) – He doesn’t reveal his sites income now because of people with limiting beliefs about income but recently made an income of about $60,000+ in one of his weekend workshops.

As a young single male, I can live fine on £800/$1308 per month but for some of you it will be something like £1200/$1962)/month. Decide what income you want to make and start working towards it. Don’t say you don’t know how. Is that really true or are you just putting off doing something because it scares you a little? Just look at the huge success of StevePavlina.com. His motto is to just keep concentrating on providing value and delivering it and you will make money. Don’t make money your focus and find something you love.

This is the start of a dysfunction that affects almost all of the human race barring the few who have woken up from its trance. When you go from being a baby, then to adolescence and adulthood you start to identify with thoughts. This happens at a very early age so affects your mind at its most susceptible. You are called by your name from birth and it will probably be one of the first words you can say, either that or the name of one of your parents.  This starts the process of thought identification. You identify with the basic thought that you are your name. “I’m Richard” pretty much equals “I’m a thought”, the thought of Richard. Take a moment to digest that.

Then later in life comes identification with jobs, social positions, financial strength, music preference etc. Thoughts are on the level of form. This it the level which all “things” are that we can perceive. The only thing we cannot perceive is what we are because we ARE it. If you could perceive what you are then what would be perceiving it? It’s impossible. You are everything that exists that is not a thing yet we are taught that we are things. This is obviously unnatural and leads to great disruption.

When you identify with thought you will then start to identify with beliefs which are collections of similar thoughts and physical objects which starts off as your body but this extends to your work place, home, possessions etc. You identify with your body because, like more than 99% of the human race, you are completely unaware of the formless dimension within yourself. You are only aware of the form. So the form aspect of you (your body) is what you think your true nature is. Does this sound familiar? It should do. It’s the story of the human race so far.

Consider this. Isn’t it silly and childish how something like your losing your job can get you upset? You are completely unaffected physically yet you feel inside that this could somehow mean your physical end. Something that you ultimately don’t have full control over has just changed form. This is not to say that you should passively accept it. Accept that it has happened, have no inner resistance and then go to work on changing the things that upset you.

You must have come to the realization in your life that all form things eventually won’t exist. Your first love probably didn’t last forever, your happiness at your first paycheck gave way to the fact that you paid so much in tax.  These things are subject to time whereas you are timeless consciousness temporarily embodying a human body. When you put yourself in the time dimension you become victim to the vigor of time. You will get anxious about death and this will affect every area of your life as your purpose becomes to preserve your form body and identifications. You will cling to money, family and other things you perceive as possessions as if when they die you too will die. This is because you think you are form and a form death would mean your death.

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever had a thought that lasted a year? Or even 1 month? 1 day? Thoughts are transient objects and tend to be much more transient than physical things. If you think you are a thought like “I’m Richard”, “I’m a banker”, “I’m a spiritual person”. Then when these things appear to you to not be true you will feel like you have died or death is imminent. This causes immense suffering for a person. To feel like you have no control and you are dying a little each day. It’s not normal.

This suffering has a purpose though. The suffering will break the false self that has been created. When you have suffered enough you will be so motivated to get out of this state that you will find a way. Your spiritual mother will force you to wake up just like my birth mother did all the way through school.

The universe will give you the teacher you need when you are truly ready. When the student is ready, the master appears. You will find the resources flowing into your life as if from nowhere. The universe wants you to do well and have what you want. Maybe you’re not ready to start to awaken yet and that’s fine. When you’re ready you’ll find a teacher.

Truth vs. Ego

If you find yourself looking for inner stillness to become something more in the eyes of your mind then you will 100% definitely NOT succeed. It has become another form label that you are going to add to yourself. “Look at me, I’m a spiritual person. I’m much more developed and therefore a better person than you.”. Go into it because your intuition tells you too and you are at the point of awakening. How do you know if you are ready to awaken? You will just know, you will feel the absolute urgency for change.

It can’t be an adding of form because this is an ego level thing and this is exactly what we are trying to transcend. Enlightenment is not the adding of more to you. It is the stripping away of all form identification and suffering until you are just left with what you are which is unity with all that is. Don’t try and mentally understand this. That’s the ego trying to come in again with duality. It wants to create the thing to understand and the thing trying to understand it which are illusions within unity.  If there is something within you that knows this is right even a little bit, listen to it.

The Plan

Here are some techniques that I and others have used successfully to undergo a spiritual awakening. Feel free to teach these to others too.

Logical Questioning – If you want to change a belief you have to rock it a little so it becomes unstable. Ask yourself questions that are designed to change your belief. Some that I used include things like:

• “If my pancreas was removed and I was my body then would I still be Richard? How much of my body has to be removed before I cease to be Richard if I’m still alive and responding?
• “If I died and then came back to life during illness was I my body during that time? What if people told me my body was still there? Are they lying?”
• “When I say my body, who is the me who has the body? What is the distinction here?”

It’s a good idea to put yourself in a meditative state through 20 minutes of relaxation meditation before doing this as you can concentrate and communicate with your subconscious much easier.

Good beliefs to question include:

• Am I my body?
• Where was I before I was born?
• What differentiates me from someone else?

Eventually the belief will become unstable then questionable and then downright silly.

This operates on the mind level so I would recommend this for beginners. Pure awareness meditation is more advanced.

Pure Awareness Meditation

One meditation I enjoy is to become pure awareness which is your true identity at the deepest of levels. I sit in meditation and after relaxing myself for 10 minutes I simply sit at the gate of my mind and become totally aware. If this sound impractical at all to you then simply sit, eyes closed in silence and listen to the silence which is the background to all things. Don’t struggle whatever you do. Just be. Let all things pass you by and become aware of them. You will see a thought come up. acknowledge it and sit at the gate of your mind. Whenever anything is bought to your awareness bring the light of consciousness to it without thinking. Just look at it like a man who’s mind is silenced by the beauty of a sun set. There is no mental chattering. The aim is to become concentrated in the state of no thought. Don’t be thinking “Oh man, I’m struggling, he told me not to struggle”. Just be. It’s tough at first but it is the most rewarding experience the universe has to offer bar none.

I’ve achieved pure awareness recently a few times for a couple of minutes or so and to be totally honest I was scared. The absolute unlimited feeling of power, the feeling that God is running through your veins right their and then and communicating with every fiber of what you are is pure ecstasy. You become transparent to light and embody it, you become timeless and infinite and then return to your physical body. It’s infinitely better than an orgasm or achieving your life’s dreams in the physical world. And it’s all free! But seriously, no words can explain it and when you experience it you will know exactly what I mean. Why else do you think the Buddha spent weeks contemplating whether his insights were worthy of teaching. They’re so subtle and hard to verbalize and much of it is a personal story.

How To Find Others who Have Awakened

There will come a point on your spiritual path when the people you used to socialize with seem dull and lifeless and you’ll feel totally disconnected from them because they are disconnected from their spiritual dimension and have yet to have a spiritual awakening. Reach out and connect with people who have found their way though suffering or others on the same journey as yourself. Here are some resources.

• The Internet – Humanity has never had so much information at its fingertips. It,s a vast resource of free information. Things are at the stroke of a few keys and 5 seconds now that just 20 years ago would have taken at least a trip to the library and 200 years ago you’d never get to read. Just Google things
• Meetup.com (Free) – This site helps you find or create a group of like minded people and has meetings worldwide. There is lots of spiritual groups on there.
• Books – Reading a great book is like sitting down and conversing with the greatest minds in history. Plenty have awakened to a new way of life. I recommend Eckhart Tolle, Lao Tzu, Buddha and Jesus. With Jesus though, try to be like him, don’t try to be a good Christian. Big distinction there and I’m sure you know what I mean.

Eckhart Tolles beautiful book ‘ Stillness Speaks has “a collection of “200 concise and beautifully illuminating entries arranged into 12 reflective themes”. These are perfect snippets for meditation. The 12 themes, in order, are:

• Silence & stillness
• Beyond the thinking mind
• The egoic self, the now
• Who you truly are
• Acceptance and surrender,
• Nature, relationships,
• Death and the eternal,
• Suffering and the end of suffering.
• Meditations

Oh before I forget, here’s the best resource to find anything online, enjoy!

Consciousness: “the state of being conscious; awareness of one’s own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.” – reference.com

As kooky as this sounds, most people can relate to it a little. Have you ever experienced what Abraham Maslow coined “a peak experience”? Where you are totally in the moment, in a state of flow, where future and past have no hold over you. People strive for these states of total momentary awareness by taking alcohol and drugs, or fighting to be in that state of flow which forces all their sensory perceptions to be in the present moment.

Consciousness in the world at the moment is at a very low level.

If you don’t understand what I mean, have you ever spent 20 minutes on a bus or in an elevator thinking about something, only to come out the other side and realise that you don’t remember a single thing from that journey? What colour was the mans shoes in front of you? How many floors are their in the building? That’s because only the physical element of you was in that lift, you were trapped in your world as thoughts.

Accessing presence

Recently I’ve read a lot of books and articles on becoming present. I use several techniques to become present depending on the situation and convenience. There is more than one way to become present, paraphrasing Eckhart Tolle, all these techniques do is remove the rubbish and clutter between you and truth which deep down you know already. A lot of these techniques involve stepping out of and beyond the mind.

• Eat slowly and deliberately – As you eat, eat slowly and concentrate on the feeling, texture and taste of each bite. Usually when you eat, you don’t appreciate the flavour of food, you simply consume it and onto the next thing you were going to do.
• Walking Meditation – Go for a walk in the local park or another area of nature and concentrate on each footstep you take, listen to the birds.
• Listen to someone you disagree with – When somebody says something that you disagree with, listen to them as they speak, don’t be formulating your reply or thinking about what to eat tonight. Just listen and look them in the eyes. This is a simple truth that is overlooked and probably the hardest on the list.
• Concentrate on your breathing – I often do this before sleeping as its helps get rid of useless mental chatter about the day ahead. Concentrate your focus on the rising and falling of your chest as you breathe, try not to control your breathing but simply become aware of it.
• Taking a long shower – By taking a long shower, you can feel the water hitting your back and concentrate on the physical feeling of it. This is a great way to start the day because it focuses your mind before the workday begins.
• Try looking at something without calling it something – For example, see a cup on the table and don’t call it a cup just recognise it as being here at this moment, observe it with your eyes and don’t mentally label it, you then step outside of your mind.
• Get up and watch the sunrise, or watch the sunset and stars before bed – There’s hardly anything that brings you present and bypasses the mind more than a sunrise. Just watching it, gives you that mental clarity and breathless feeling, similar to when you look up at a night full of stars and getting a feeling of connectedness.

The beauty is that none of this except for the slow down one needs to take time out of your day, its a question of concentration and focus on what you are doing at his moment, which is not related to time slightly

Benefits of presence

• Laser-like Focus: because you focus on only what is happening now. You are not pulled by your next activity or still mentally lagging from your previous activity so can give your undivided attention.
• The ability to see others for what they are – When you are truly present, you don’t label others with tags who you come across, you simply are aware of them. This makes it hard to make enemies of others and bring a sense of peace into your life.
• Banishing the self: Because you are presence, becoming more present means becoming closer to the real you. You are a constant stream of current moments. Not a person with a history. You are never last Thursday or tomorrow, you are neither today, You are the here and now. I realised this after reading a post by Steve Pavlina on presence, which I can’t seem to find.

As you go around your daily life, slow down – I know what you’re thinking, heaven forbid! I have enough things on my plate without this guy telling me to stop going so fast. Most of us are racing through life at 150 mph and never slow down to appreciate the current moment and what it has to offer, as Eckhart Tolle accurately puts in his paradigm shifting book “The Power of Now”. The only moment we have is the present moment, all past is a memory, and future is a projection of the mind. So as you type at your computer, stop for a second take a deep breath and start to feel each key as you type it and you will step out of past/future being and into the present, increasing your consciousness.

2. Realise that this moment is the only one you ever have – Now is the only moment that you ever have and ever will have. The past is just you remembering it and the future is simply what you think is going to happen and you projecting those thoughts. This is empowering rather than disempowering. It helps you focus on this moment, the only one you have, and realise that the past can’t hold you back any longer.

3. Realise that what stands between you and achieving your goals is action – Many people tout motivation and discipline as the key to goal achievement. You can read books all day about how to fix a car tyre but until you put it into action, but experience is second to nothing. Who would you rather have somebody who has worked from nothing fixing car tyres for 2 years or someone who had studied it for 5 years but had no experience, I hope you answer the first one. Action, Action, Action. Scared of talking to the opposite sex? Make a promise to yourself to talk to 5 of them tomorrow and each following day for a week and see the results for yourself.

4. Love everyone as you love yourself – Extend this to all life, animals plants etc. If you don’t treat others as you wish to be treated, then how can you seriously expect to be treated with that type of respect, that belief system is illogical. Loving unconditionally helps yourself also. I’m a believer that what you put out comes back to you. You put out love, you receive love. You go out seeking trouble, you’ll get it.

5. You don’t have as long to live as you think – You may get 70-80 years of life. Sounds long right? It’ll fly by. 45 years of work for somebody else and then what? You’re purpose has been spent? Get serious about your life and your goals, take lots and lots of action, see what sticks and them go for it. Plan your goals on what you want to be remembered for, don’t make egotistical goals though, make goals that create value and contribution. Only you can decide what creates a contribution and what doesn’t.

6. The people you socialise with make you – The people you socialise with make you the person you are on the outside. You adopt their mindsets and habits. It’s like an English Proverb I remember frequently “Show me your horse and I will tell you what you are”. Usually paraphrased to “show me your friends, and i’ll tell you what you are”. Socialising with the type of people you want to be shows you that its achievable, they will very likely help you and speed along the process if you ask, these people will motivate you when you are down.

7. Forgive but don’t forget - When someone or somebody does something to test your temper, and they then ask for forgiveness, forgive them. But, if you forget, no lesson has been learned. Forgiveness is always the route. Forgetting will only lead you to make the same mistakes repeatedly.

8. We are one – (thank you Lion King) Getting a little mystical here but bare with me. Do you really think that you are the body that you possess or your current state of mind? If so, then you are in constant change, that can’t be right can it? You’re state of body is changing as we speak, cells are dying and being born. Your state of mind alters between moments of anger and compassion. Have you ever entered that state where you lash out in temper? Then immediately regret it? This is your habits and emotions getting the better of you. The piece of the jigsaw that got it for me is this: Where are you when you dream? You are not physically in your body as you don’t respond. In dreams, you sometimes “feel” as if you’re actually there, you are their, you feel emotions etc. We are in Earth a huge system. We are helping ourselves when we help others, and there is really no others. Other is a concept routed in the tribal mindset, “you vs. me” “I’m better than you” We are all together and we have to learn to cooperate.

9. If you need help ask for it – Don’t be full of pride, be humble. If you need help, ask. By asking for help it shows your humility, many would see it as a sign of weakness but this is an ego thing trying to cause separation.

10. Decide what is the worst that can happen – This helps clarify your goals. If you are fearful about a situation simply tell yourself the absolute worst situation that could occur. By doing this you realise that the outcome would probably not be as bad as you think. ]]> http://richardshelmerdine.com/blog/2009/09/29/10-timeless-lessons/feed/ 0