I'm gonna share with you four of my favorite quotes that if you bring them into your mind and your heart and you apply them to your life,
They're gonna make the days,
Weeks,
And months ahead better.
They're gonna show you what the opportunity is,
What the obstacles are,
And what's the one insight that you can have to make it all easier for yourself.
In the end,
I'm also gonna share with you one of my new favorite writings that I've read recently that will help you create more stability and groundedness along the path.
Okay,
The first quote is one that's so important.
It's made a huge impact on my life.
It's actually the foundation for this book,
The Now Effect.
And you may have heard of this quote before.
It's by,
Or it's been attributed to psychiatrist,
Neurologist,
And Holocaust survivor,
Viktor Frankl,
That said,
Between stimulus and response,
There's a space.
In that space lies our power to choose our response,
And in our response lies our growth and our freedom.
So what does this mean?
This means that in any given moment,
A moment that I wake up in the morning and I just get caught in a routine,
Whatever that might be,
Or a moment where I get stimulated and hijacked by anxiety,
My mind is racing about all the potential catastrophes that might happen,
Or starts to reach into the past and start ruminating on all the things in life that didn't go well,
Or my focus on what I can't do,
Or I just get caught in the routine of I'm in my family or I'm waiting in line somewhere,
And I just grab my phone and I'm just kinda going through different news or social media that's not making me feel good,
That's not nourishing me.
In all of those moments of our lives,
There's a space.
And in that space,
The moment we name what's happening,
A great quote by a friend and mentor of mine,
Dan Siegel,
Is name it to tame it.
And the moment we're able to name what's happening,
We step into that space,
And the moment we settle into the ability into our bodies,
Into a sense of awareness,
We widen that space,
We widen what's called a choice point,
Perspective on different choices.
Do I need to be paying attention to this right now?
Is there something more nourishing for me right now?
What do I need even in this moment?
What's most important for me to pay attention to,
To even have the wherewithal,
The blood flow in our prefrontal region?
We have to step into that space between stimulus and response,
It's always there and always available for us.
And so that's the very first thing,
That's the opportunity that's always here for us.
That's that space between stimulus and response.
Okay,
So this gets me to a second quote by Helen Keller,
Which says,
Okay,
So now what's the obstacle that's here?
Okay,
So there's all these spaces that are here,
I can focus on what matters to me,
There's growth and freedom available to me in the moments of my life,
In my life,
So what's the obstacle here?
And Helen Keller says,
When one door of happiness closes,
Another one opens,
But often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
So what's this saying?
This is saying that our brain is so wired to attend to what's negative or to attend to what we can't do or to attend to what's not possible.
And depending on how we grew up and the messages we got from the people in our community,
In our life,
Or maybe how we were genetically predisposed in some way,
That makes those negative things even stickier.
So when one door of happiness closes,
Another one opens,
But we don't see it because we're so focused on what's not available to us or what we can't do.
And so here we go,
We allow ourselves to,
Now this doubles up on the first quote,
We say,
Okay,
If this is me,
If I feel like my brain focuses too much on what's not possible or what I can't do,
Or there might be moments of happiness that are there that we'll get into in the next quote,
That I may not be aware of,
Then can I settle in and be aware of this,
What's called this negativity bias and see if I can name it when it's happening so I can settle into that space between stimulus and response and not allow this obstacle to run my life.
It's not allowing me to focus my energy on the things to allow the energy to allow my attention and energy to flow in the direction of the life that I'm wanting to live.
So we wanna be on the lookout for it and we wanna name it to tame it,
That's it.
Okay,
The third quote,
And this gets to the third quote.
Okay,
So if one door of happiness closes and another one opens,
But I can't see it because I'm so focused on this closed door that's here,
Then I move into Abraham Joshua Heschel's quote,
Who was a rabbi,
A peace activist,
He marched with Martin Luther King and he said,
Life is routine and routine is resistance to wonder.
So there are moments of awe and wonder all around us in any given moment.
I lead people through it on and off all through the week,
Every week,
All year long.
And so all we have to do is begin to attend to it.
When's the last time that you stepped out of the routine of your life and you paid attention to the reality that you are living and breathing right now.
Jon Kabat-Zinn once said that,
As long as we're living and breathing,
There's more right with us than wrong with us.
The very fact that we have this blood flow going through our body and a heart pumping and lungs breathing oxygen,
And this air brings essential nutrients into our body.
And the fact that right now,
I have an ease of breathing that's here and I can move my arms and I can speak like this because I have this brain with 86 billion neurons and trillions of connections going back and forth,
Allowing me to operate in this way and allowing you to receive this message right now across space and time.
If that's not wonder,
I don't know really what is,
The fact that I was driving last night and there was an orange moon,
Huge in the sky.
That took my eye.
The fact that there's buzzing insects around that we might have an aversion to potentially,
But like moving along,
Having their own experiences in their own lives and billions of people with their own stories in this world that are happening.
And we're all living and experiencing this thing called life.
But we get caught in the routine because our brain is wired towards routine.
So,
And that's okay.
That helps me do things automatically to handle more complex tasks,
But when life itself becomes routine,
When the people around us and our relationships with them become routine,
When our work becomes routine,
Then our brain closes down onto the novelty that's all around us,
The wonder that's all around us.
So for you,
Take time today out here and there and see if you can be aware of where is ah and wonder in my life or outside.
Is there something,
Is there where I can pay attention and just find one thing that I look at and I'm like,
That's amazing that that's actually exists or that actually works that way.
So life is routine,
Routine is resistance to wonder.
How do we step out and move into this?
And let me tell you a fourth quote now that's gonna make it all easier.
So here we go.
This is a quote by motivational speaker,
Jim Rohn,
That said,
You're the average of the five people you surround yourself with.
So what does that mean?
Is that really true?
Is there science behind this like number five?
Not that I'm aware of,
But what it does speak to is the reality that we're all connected and that the people that we send messages to back and forth,
Whether we know them or don't know them,
Or the people that we actually come physically in contact with,
Or the people we're just thinking about sometimes that are people in our life,
Or the animals in our life,
All have an influence on us.
And we have an influence on them.
Meaning that the way they think and how they act actually influenced and keeps top of mind for me how to think and act.
And so if we want to get better at exercising or living a healthy life or meditation or being kinder to one another,
Or just having that top of mind to live,
To be in that way,
We don't need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
What we need to do is make more contact with people who are doing that kind of thing and allow their energy,
Allow their actions and the things they're saying to help keep top of mind for us,
The types of thoughts and actions that we want to live by.
And it makes it more likely to be.
There's a reality to the science of interconnection.
There's a reality to emotional and behavioral contagion.
This has been studied in the science for years.
There's nothing mystical about that.
That's like hard and real science.
And so consider for a moment,
Who do I make the most contact with in my life?
And maybe who do I need to bring more into my life or make more contact with?
That's a good influence on the way I want to live my life.
Okay,
So now as promised,
I'm gonna share with you one of my new favorite writings by John Rudell that will support us in keeping us steady on the path ahead.
Here it goes.
My brain and heart divorced a decade ago.
Over who was to blame about how big of a mess I've become?
Eventually,
They couldn't be in the same room with each other.
Now my head and heart share custody of me.
I stay with my brain during the week and my heart gets me on the weekends.
They never speak to one another.
Instead,
They give me the same note to pass to each other each week.
In their notes,
They send to one another,
Always say the same thing.
This is all your fault.
On Sundays,
My heart complains about how my head has let me down in the past.
And on Wednesday,
My head lists all of the times my heart has screwed things up for me in the future.
They blame each other for the state of my life.
There's been a lot of yelling and crying.
So lately,
I've been spending a lot of time with my gut.
Who served as my unofficial therapist most nights,
I sneak out of the window in my rib cage and slide down my spine and collapse on my gut's plush leather chair that's always open for me.
And as I just sit,
Sit,
Sit,
Sit until the sun comes up.
Last evening,
My gut asked me if I was having a hard time being caught between my heart and my head.
I nodded.
I said,
I didn't know if I could live with either of them anymore.
My heart is always sad about something that happened yesterday while my head is always worried about something that may happen tomorrow,
I lamented.
My gut squeezed my hand.
I just can't live with my mistakes of the past or my anxiety about the future,
I sighed.
My gut smiled and said,
In that case,
You should go stay with your lungs for a while.
I was confused.
The look on my face gave it away.
If you are exhausted about your heart's obsession with the fixed past and your mind's focused on the uncertain future,
Your lungs are the perfect place for you.
There is no yesterday in your lungs.
There is no tomorrow there either.
There is only now.
There is only inhale.
There is only exhale.
There is only this moment.
There is only breath.
And in that breath,
You can rest while your heart and head work their relationship out.
This morning,
While my brain was busy reading tea leaves and while my heart was staring at old photographs,
I packed a little bag and walked to the door of my lungs.
Before I could even knock,
She opened the door with a smile and as a gust of air embraced me,
She said,
What took you so long?
